MY LAST DAY AS NC'S POET LAUREATE

(Dancing to the Music!)

My term as North Carolina's Poet Laureate officially ends at midnight tonight. The four years I've spent trying to represent our state's writers and readers have been full to overflowing. And no wonder. North Carolina is brimful with writers, as we all know, but even better, it is full of people who want to be a part of this literary community, people who work hard to keep it alive. I've tried to do my job as best as I could, but I leave frustrated by what remains to be done and how difficult these tasks become in the wake of our financial crisis. How long before we have another Laureate? Who knows. I hope it's not more than a year. In the meantime, I will continue to keep this blog going, and as always, I welcome your comments, suggestions, and your own poems and prose.

One of my good friends, Newt Smith, of the WCU English Department, spends his last day as a WCU employee today, too. I was asked to write a retirement poem for him, so I'm posting it today, one of my last "assignments," one that I enjoyed to the max! Newt and I worked together for a number of years in the English Department. The "cubicle" I mention in the poem does not refer to the laureateship! It refers to the tiny, tiny office I occupied for years as Poet-in-Residence at WCU. "Retard" is a play on how folks in the mountains pronounce certain words like stairs and retired. I have always thought "climbing the stars" sounded so much more poetic than climbing the stairs!

The doris in the poem is my friend doris davenport, whose work has been featured on both my blogs. Look her up.

As for Ghost Dogs, I didn't make that up. There are books about these manifestations, several of which have been published by Blair Publishers in Winston-Salem. Here is a brief description of Ghost Dogs of the South. (Blair)

Dog ghosts (dogs that have become ghosts), ghost dogs (humans who return as ghosts in the shape of dogs), dogs that see ghosts, dogs that are afraid of ghosts--all make an appearance in these twenty stories that illuminate the shadow side of man's best friend.

So, you can see this last occasional poem pulled in a lot of material. Why shouldn't a poem cast as wide a net as it wants? Spread its roots as deeply as it needs to spread them?



(Yellow Retro Roots, by Cindy Davis)




(Newt)


Retard

For Newt

Once I heard a woman,
when asked in downtown Sylva
how her husband was doing,
say, “Why, honey, he’s
retard.” I knew what she meant
and your neighbor Mildred when she said,
“I’m going to climb up the stars.”
That’s called climbing the Retard Track,

not the Tenure Track. Just imagine,
Newt, now you too can
climb up the stars. Or
spend all day doing
The Dawg, as our friend doris
calls it. I saw her do it
at Wordfest, at the Smoky Mountains
Bookfair, after Obama
won. (She sent me a jpg.) If you had
to think every day about tenure,
you wouldn’t be caught dead
Doin’ the Dawg. But now, dearest
Newt, you can do it
till the proverbial cows come
home, if your back doesn’t
give up the Ghost Dog and bring
you down. Just do The Dawg long
enough to feel like you’re really
and truly Retard, and then sit yourself

down, have a beer, look at the sky.
Listen to birds. Did we ever believe
they were out there when we had to work
in our cubicles? Don’t get get me
started on clouds. How they keep moving
on to another place, sort of like being
Retard. The sky’s a big dance floor.
The clouds like it like that!
They said to tell you,
my friend, that you’ll like it too.



(doris)

SPRING CLEANING: A Poem for Chitra Divakaruni

A couple of months ago I received an invitation to submit some poems, each no longer than 32 lines, to an anthology whose theme was "collecting." I collect words, so why not try to write some poems collecting words I like. I stood in the kitchen, thinking about how badly my house, especially the kitchen, need some elbow grease, as my mother used to call it. On the kitchen counter spread my out of control spice collection. Hmmmm. I was also reading Chitra Divakaruni's novels; Mistress of Spices is perhaps her best known, since it was made into a movie. I like them all, but I have to say that Sister of My Heart and
The Vine of Desire is where to begin if you don't know her work. She's also a poet and it was as a poet that I first came to know of her. As I fiddled around with the names of spices, I kept thinking of Chitra, some of the recipes she'd posted on her blog, and so ended up thinking of this as her poem.


SPRING CLEANING

for Chitra

I take stock of the spices
I've kept for too long--

coriander and cumin,
that catch-all called curry,

and paprika, accent
that's always the first earthy

syllable, rich as Hungarian
sod swirling into the gulasz.

Masala and tandoori powders
a drooping wife might sniff

to kindle her passion
for waking back up again,

turmeric turning her fingertips
golden, a pinch of it

under her lip
like my grandmother's snuff,

balm for aching wrists
after the grinding of nutmeg

and cinnamon. Cayenne
for cleansing the sinuses.

Gesundheit! my grandmother,
framed on the wall by my pantry

exclaims! Dump them
simply because expiration

dates say so? Gourmet
magazine sneering "Off with their

lids, down the drain"?
I won't do it. Just let me

stay here a little while longer,
inhaling their presence. Their names.

This painting by Cindy Davis, one of her Twenty Somethings, captures some of the imagery in Chitra's work. I love the way Cindy works with trees and their roots. I soon will have a house full of her paintings.

Totem Ghost in the Original

I have Totem Ghost hanging just beside my front door. Not the print, the painting. It reminds me a little of a painting by my great-grandmother Ella Valentine Fry. I'll have to post a photo of that one tomorrow.

On the other side is a painting titled Verde. More about that a little later, too. With a better photo.

Paintings That Burn Through My Eyes

My great-grandmother, Ella Valentine Fry, was a painter. Her large oil paintings hung on the walls of our house while I was growing up in Southwest Georgia, and I often wanted to walk into them, especially the ones with snow-capped mountains, magnificent elk, a moon hovering in the night sky, and, in one, a young American Indian woman guiding her canoe to shore. That was my "Red Wing" painting, the one I still carry in my mind as if it's close enough to touch. I sang "Red Wing" in my private voice lessons: Oh, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing. The young woman pictured on the sheet music looked like the one in the painting. My great-grandmother did many things in her life besides paint; she was a Pentecostalist preacher, one of the first women teachers in the Black Hills, and the mother of several children. She lived her later years in Dahlonega, Georgia, where my grandmother was born.

Right now, as I sit at the computer, I am looking at a painting by another artist whose landscapes widen my eyes with their burning moons, their dark pines rising out of the frame, their mists swirling like wildfire smoke or morning fog twining through a Georgia field. The woman who painted these images is Cindy Davis, whose work I discovered at a large show of SW Georgia artists in my hometown of Camilla two years ago. This painting I am looking at is titled South Georgia Pine. It reminds me of the sunsets I was drawn to so often while growing up, standing by the highway, looking through the pines at the sun swelling as it settled into the earth. Cindy has captured that moment in this painting. Another of her paintings, Dusty Moon, captures the same burning landscape that I remember so well.



The painting that haunts me most of all, however, is one titled Totem Ghost. Here again we see the Georgia woods, dark and light and color tangled up in each other, and down in the corner of the painting, a ghostly figure, perhaps a dream figure. Is it threatening? My first reaction was that it looked like a Ku Klux Klansman, barely visible in the darkness, an image haunting beyond words for anyone who has lived for years in the South. Maybe this figure is really some sort of Rorschach for the viewer. It has scarecrow qualities, doesn't it?

Yet it looks barely real, an apparition rising up from the soil.
Behind it the world seems on fire. The three pine trees
look charred, the moon about to be covered with smoke. I enter this painting again and again,
looking around, letting myself be swept up in its waves of line and color.

I encourage you to visit Cindy's website, http://cindydavisart.com. To see what other SW Georgia artists are creating, go to http://flintrivergallery.blogspot.com/ and flintrivergallery.com. I like to think that my great-grandmother would have been drawn to Cindy's paintings as I am. I also like to think that in some part of our imaginations, some timeless sphere, all three of us are young girls standing in the pine trees watching the sun burning down into the cornfields and later the ripe moon rising over a landscape that forever haunts and inspires us.