Welcome to where I am, where my kitchen's always messy, a pot's (or a poet) always about to boil over, a dog is always begging to be fed. Drafts of poems on the counter. Windows filled with leaves. Wind. Clouds moving over the mountains. If you like poetry, books, and music--especially dog howls when a siren unwinds down the hill-- you'll like it here.


MY NEW AUTHOR'S SITE, KATHRYNSTRIPLINGBYER.COM, THAT I MYSELF SET UP THROUGH WEEBLY.COM, IS NOW UP. I HAD FUN CREATING THIS SITE AND WOULD RECOMMEND WEEBLY.COM TO ANYONE INTERESTED IN SETTING UP A WEBSITE. I INVITE YOU TO VISIT MY NEW SITE TO KEEP UP WITH EVENTS RELATED TO MY NEW BOOK.


MY NC POET LAUREATE BLOG, MY LAUREATE'S LASSO, WILL REMAIN UP AS AN ARCHIVE OF NC POETS, GRADES K-INFINITY! I INVITE YOU TO VISIT WHEN YOU FEEL THE NEED TO READ SOME GOOD POEMS.

VISIT MY NEW BLOG, MOUNTAIN WOMAN, WHERE YOU WILL FIND UPDATES ON WHAT'S HAPPENING IN MY KITCHEN, IN THE ENVIRONMENT, IN MY IMAGINATION, IN MY GARDEN, AND AMONG MY MOUNTAIN WOMEN FRIENDS.




Tuesday, April 26, 2011

POETS OF THE DAY: Marianne Boruch and Mary Adams


While at the Flannery O'Connor conference in Milledgeville, Ga. two weeks ago, I had the great good luck of meeting Marianne Boruch, one of the featured readers. I liked her immediately. We were standing in the Andalucia farmhouse kitchen, remarking on how it reminded us of our grandmothers' kitchens. Later in the week we talked about all sorts of things. Her reading was memorable, her talk on Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Bishop brilliant, to use an overworked description. In so many ways she reminded me of my friend Mary Adams, herself a brilliant poet and essayist, and although their poetic styles are not that much alike, the ways their imaginations work seem to me to be in sync. I'm pairing them today to show how writers connect without even knowing each other. Marianne and Mary seem sisters in poetic spirit to me. I hope you enjoy reading their poems.



(Phacelia in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, April 2009)


Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago and received a BS from the University of Illinois and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Grace, Fallen from (2008); Poems New & Selected (2004), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Moss Burning(1993). Her essay collections include In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995). In an interview with Brooke Horvath for the Denver Quarterly, Boruch noted, “Both poetry and the essay come from the same impulse—to think about something and at the same time, see it closely, carefully, and enact it.”

Boruch’s lyric poems often shake an ordinary moment from its shell, separating strands of thought and habit with a gaze at once wry, self-conscious, and unblinking. As poet and Oberlin College Press editor David Young observes, “Her poems are contained, steady, and exceptionally precise. They build toward blazing insights with the utmost honesty and care.”

Boruch has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program, and was honored with their College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College.


Nest

I walked out, and the nest
was already there by the step. Woven basket
of a saint
sent back to life as a bird
who proceeded to make
a mess of things. Wind
right through it, and any eggs
long vanished. But in my hand it was
intricate pleasure, even the thorny reeds
softened in the weave. And the fading
leaf mold, hardly
itself anymore, merely a trick
of light, if light
can be tricked. Deep in a life
is another life. I walked out, the nest
already by the step.

The Body

has its little hobbies. The lung
likes its air best after supper,
goes deeper there to trade up
for oxygen, give everything else
away. (And before supper, yes,
during too, but there’s
something about evening, that
slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,
still coming, still going ... ) As for
bones—femur, spine,
the tribe of them in there—they harden
with use. The body would like
a small mile or two. Thank you.
It would like it on a bike
or a run. Or in the water. Blue.
And food. A habit that involves
a larger circumference where a garden’s
involved, beer is brewed, cows
wake the farmer with their fullness,
a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat
understands I will be crushed
into flour and starry-dust
the whole room, the baker
sweating, opening a window
to acknowledge such remarkable
confetti. And the brain,
locked in its strange
dual citizenship, idles there in the body,
neatly terraced and landscaped.
Or left to ruin, such a brain,
wild roses growing
next to the sea. The body is
gracious about that. Oh, their
scent sometimes. Their
tangle. In truth, in secret,
the first thing
in morning the eye longs to see.


Mary Adams grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Smith College, after which she received her MFA in writing from the University of Iowa Workshop, where she studied with Jorie Graham. She later took a PhD from the University of Houston graduate writing program. For the past decade she has taught poetry, Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, and Web Design at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. Her first book, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, was published in the University of Florida Press poetry series. She has won a number of awards for her work, including a fellowship fromthe National Endowment for the Arts. Her chapbook Commandment appeared last year from Spring Street Editions. The following two poems are from that collection.



Valediction in March




Today she accidentally broke the gentle

specter of joy. Just yesterday his splayed

body slender as an insect, as a foal

had urged her awake.


Her bed remembered his breath. But now the earth

was brown again. Four birds’ beneficent

notes, sheer and far away, threaded

the mud with red:


a stop sign, a cardinal, maybe a raisin box.

She tried to make the black fronds of trees

uttering up from the hill like radio

towers made out of birds


lie down. She tried to gray the sky until

the light was gone. It was the same day every year.

Four notes dwindled into two, and a wreath

of mud-soaked dogs


crushed a flower’s promise into brown.

It was the same day, starker and longer.

These were the same birds, the same

splinters of grace.


Tame



It's when your house erupts

with animals, dogs on the roof, dogs

hassling joggers, dogs helping themselves

from the icebox, that you know

the man will leave. Why exactly's

harder. A man undaunted by a cat's

flaunted asshole surely knows

love works the wrong end

sometimes. Nor should squalor

scare a man who eats mayonnaise

every morning. Maybe it's

a fear of ghosts, you think.

In a movie once, you saw the hero

tame a wolf and then an Indian.

You’d hoped for such a man,

gentle hands, gold

hair like prairie grass.

Even the wolf trusted him, blithely

standing on his groin

or wagging hopefully for days.

Nothing's worth that kind of wait.

Not you who cannot give the wolf back

to the dog, not he

whose kindness kills the wolf

and Indian before he rides away

at movie's end.

Love makes the wrong promises.

Above you, dogs are crooning from the roof

as from the wild.



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