April Poet of the Day: Cathy Smith Bowers

What better way to begin National Poetry Month than with a poem by North Carolina's current Poet Laureate, Cathy Smith Bowers. Today Cathy and I will be reading together at Caldwell Community College in Hudson, NC. We admire each other's poetry and enjoy each other's company.

Cathy was born in the small town of Lancaster, S.C.,one of six children born to a mill worker and a housewife. She received her bachelor's degree in English in 1972 and a master's degree in English in 1976, both from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.

In 1973 Cathy started her career as a high school English teacher in her native South Carolina. She worked there for ten years before becoming an English instructor at Queens University in Charlotte. She also served as director of composition from 1989–1995 and as poet-in-residence from 1996–2004. She is currently on the faculty for Queens' M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program, UNC Asheville's Great Smokies Writing Program and at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C.

She is the author of four books: The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas (inaugural winner of the Texas Tech University Press First Book Competition, 1992); Traveling in Time of Danger (Iris Press, 1999), A Book of Minutes (Iris Press, 2004), andThe Candle I Hold Up to See You (Iris Press, 2009).

For a video of Cathy reading "Snow," please go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SHHEZaAO4.

A SOUTHERN RHETORIC

"It's a sight in this world
the things in this world
there are to see!" my mother says
as she hurries between the stove
and Sunday table. She is just back
from vacation. Happy.
Talking mountains. Talking rivers.
Big cedars and tidal bores.
When I tease her for redundancy,
her face glows like a sturgeon moon
risen above fat buttery atolls
of biscuits, steaming promontory
of roast. She shakes her finger
in my face and scolds me good:
"Girl, don't you forget who it was
learned you to talk."
Amazing she would want
to lay claim to these syllables
piling up like railroad salvage
when I speak, to these words slow as hooves
dredging from the wet of just-plowed fields.
I watch her turn, embarrassed, to the sink,
to the pots and pans she will scrub
to a gleam so bright we can see ourselves
as if the two of us stared back
from the lost rhetoric of memory.
From the little house, the crib where
she bent each day, naming
for me the world where words always fail,
warranting, now and then,
those few extra syllables,
some things spoken twice.

First appeared in Poetry, later in Cathy's first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas.