POET OF THE DAY: RICHARD KRAWIEC

Richard Krawiec is one of North Carolina's literary treasures--novelist, poet, editor, teacher. He has a lot of laurels upon which he could rest, but the two new poems below, as well as his news about current projects, show that he isn't doing much resting these days.

My first book of free verse poems, Breakdown, was a Finalist for the 2009 Indy Awards for Poetry. My poems and stories appear in some of the top literary mags in the US – Sou’wester, many mountains moving, Shenandoah, Witness, Cream City Review, etc. I've also published 2 novels, a story collection, and 4 plays. I've been fortunate to have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NC Arts Council, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. I teach online Fiction Writing for UNC Chapel Hill, and won their Excellence in Teaching Award for 2009.

My new projects include -

My play,Cluck Variations, a comedy about an African American woman from Chicago and a white Southern suburbanite who meet at a park and learn to overcome the walls of ethnicity and culture to connect as women, was recently staged in a reading as part of the Playground A Theatre Co-operative presentation in Durham.

Starting in April I will be writing a column, Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off, for haijinx, an online magazine. I will be focusing on critiquing haiku as poems first, showing where they meet the standard of poetry, and where they fail to rise about exercises in form.

Neighbors

before my neighbor’s ranch house

two police cruisers grumble

in Park one officer stands

on wet asphalt leaning

into the rear car’s open window

my neighbor’s father, mother

pace the edge of the driveway

shaking gray-haired heads

mouths cut into deep clay

furrows of sorrow

my neighbor’s wife

slouches beside her side door

arms folded across her chest

her body trembles head ticks

in a slow disbelieving arc

heated argument

the standing officer calls

over his shoulder without looking

anywhere until a sudden abrupt

angry squawking erupts

on my front lawn

beak to beak two mocking

birds rise an upright flutter-

fight wings beating the air

before the quiet circle of impatiens

Unemployment

a row of cold houses

light so sad and yellow

it fails to extend

past the whining window panes

even the small corners

of these front stoops

huddle in darkness

somewhere a dog barks

certainly a lover must moan

blue screens flare

a drainage ditch glows

on some corner

yesterday’s debris

sparkles in the effluvial night

softly I breathe

my own breath fog

inhale the thousand effervescent

suns in the bluing sky