POET OF THE DAY: Evie Shockley

I still consider Evie Shockley a North Carolina poet, even though she was born in Tennessee and now teaches at Rutgers. She has strong ties to our state, having taught at Wake Forest University for a number of years and being involved in the Carolina African-American Writers Collective. I came to know her and her work during my stint as Poet Laureate, and she has been one of my favorites ever since.

Evie is the author of four collections of poetry: the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks. Her study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She co-edits the poetry journal jubilat and is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. The following poem is from her new collection, just out from Wesleyan University Press.

my last modernist poem, #4

(or, re-re-birth of a nation)

a clean-cut man brings a brown blackness

to a dream-carved, unprecedented

place. some see in this the end of race,

like the end of a race that begins

with a gun: a finish(ed) line we might

finally limp across. for others,

this miracle marks an end like year’s

end, the kind that whips around again

and again: an end that is chilling,

with a lethal spring coiled in the snow.

___________________________________________

ask lazarus about miracles:

the hard part comes afterwards. he stepped

into the reconstruction of his

life, knowing what would come, but not how.

POET OF THE DAY: Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux now lives in Raleigh, NC, where she teaches writing in the NC State graduate writing program. Her most recent book, The Book of Men, was published by WW Norton. Go to her website to find out about her many events and projects.

Smoke

Who would want to give it up,

the coala cat's eye in the dark room, no one there

but you and your smoke, the window

cracked to street sounds, the distant cries

of living things. Alone, you are almost

safe, smoke slipping out between the sill

and the glass, sucked into the night

you don't dare enter, its eyes drunk

and swimming with stars. Somewhere

a Dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws

of a black machine. All down the block

something inside you opens and shuts.

Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,

trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.

You don't flip on the TV or the radio, they

might muffle the sound of car engines

backfiring, and in the silence between,

streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff

of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own,

growing lighter and lighter as you inhale.

There's no music for this scarf of smoke

wrapped around your shoulders, its finger

scrawling the pale stem of your neck,

no song light enough, liquid enough,

that climbs high enough before it thins

and disappears. Death's shovel scrapes

the sidewalk, critches across the man-made

cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters,

digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.

You can hear him weaving his way

down the street, sloshed on the last breath

he swirled past his teeth before swallowing:

breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a woman's

sharp gasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child.

You can't put it out, can't stamp out the light

and let the night enter you, let it burrow through

your infinite passages. So you listen and listen

and smoke and give thanks, suck deep

with the grace of the living, blowing halos

and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains

linking around your head. Then you pull it in

again, the vein-colored smoke,

and blow it up toward a ceiling you can't see

where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,

like the ghost the night will become.

Franklin Public Library hosts WCU Literary Festival Authors

The Franklin Public Library will host three events celebrating the WCU Literary Festival that occurs during the first full week of April. I will be reading and discussing my book Coming to Rest on Sunday afternoon, March 27 at 2:00. Please go to this link to find more information about these events: http://www.fontanalib.org/pdfs/literary-festival-Franklin-2011.pdf.

Coming to Rest

1.

The Name

Because she’d not bury

the name with the dead child,

she made her surviving five children

swear they’d pass it on

to the first daughter born to them.

Another name for letting go.

Or holding on.

Another name for home.

2.

Birthday Ghazal

Why this old Persian form for today, of all days?

Why not sonnet or blank verse to help me take hold?

Down to the wire goes the season’s gold,

late this year, so long it took to take hold.

I don’t care that my days tumble down

to the compost pile. I want to look, to take hold.

Seize the day. Carpe Diem, if you like.

Bite down hard on the hook and take hold.

Down the creek float the leavings of what I once was.

Just a girl. Mostly waiting for luck to take hold.

Last night rain kept the roof busy scolding

me, wake up you dumb cluck and take hold.

I’ve already answered my e-mail, my voice

mail, my snail mail. My real work? To take hold.

Kathryn died too young. Age twelve. Now she tolls

in the dust of my name: to come back, to take hold.

3.

Sinking

The aunt I was named after died too young.

She sank at age twelve

into diabetic pneumonia. Then coma,

too pretty a word for her dying. Why cling

to another old form like this no-holds-

barred song for my aunt who died too young

to care about romance? What good is a song

now, to her? Or to me? Maybe I’ve grown too old

for such artifice, as if I’m trapped in a coma

of middle-aged dullness. My tongue

slips on names. But not hers. But why dwell

on her death. So she died, much too young,

not all like an angel who could do no wrong,

not at all blonde & pretty as I had been told.

When she sank into that final coma,

she must have looked ugly. I can’t make this

villanelle sing, no matter what I’ve been told

about Kathryn, who died too young,

years before insulin, of diabetic pneumonia.

4.

Stuck

She smoothes her skirt and squints at me.

I don’t know what to say. Or why she’s come.

The clock’s stopped ticking on the wall. Back home

again, she sees what I see, same old creek

reflecting nothing but a sky where trees

fish with their lines of moss all day. Let’s thumb

a ride to town, she dares. Let’s make the phone lines hum

above these droughty fields. Now that I’m free

I’m getting out of here. She says she wants to hear

the latest gossip, wants to have a little fun.

She tells me everything that hangs around

too long gets stuck. I nod. I don’t dare

ask her why she’s here, this dust I’ve stirred from

sleep. This shell of light. This sullen hologram.

5.

Free

This nameless creek

almost obscured by shade

where she was last seen

by the camera lens

keeps rushing through me

as she hikes her skirt

and stands wanting to be

brave enough to walk

into the current,

sickly girl whose cropped

hair won’t blow

in the summer

wind, too short,

too short, she cries,

coming to rest

in the photograph.

REMEMBERING MARCH WIND THROUGH ORGANDY CURTAINS

March has come in like a lion, blowing the clouds around like sheets on a clothesline. I call up a poem I wrote about remembering my grandmother again and again, her bloomers that swelled with wind on the clothesline, alongside her nightgowns and bedsheets. Her organdy curtains the wind teased when she opened the windows still bloom in my memory.

Again

I lie down in her sea bed that bears

me back home to the nothing left

after her house burned around it.

Her lavender handkerchief knotted

round nickels and dimes. On her dresser

a brooch in the shape of a peacock’s tail.

Organdy curtains that breathed in

and out when she opened the windows

for March to blow through like a lioness

stalking the boxwoods or a lamb bleating

out by the pump house. Her hairpins

sown over the rugs. Her voluminous apron.

Her false teeth that grinned

every night from a tall iced-tea glass

as she pulled off her house dress,

her shimmy, her bloomers

that even now swell like a mainsail with

nothingness. Lorna Doone shortbread

she nibbled till she fell asleep, leaving crumbs

in the bed sheets like sand from the white beach

at Panama City whenever I crawled into bed

with her body that smelled of the ocean

at low tide and tasted of salt

when she pulled me too close to her.

from COMING TO REST

LSU Press Poetry Series, 2006