PAT RIVIERE-SEEL: COFFEE WITH THE POET

February's Coffee with the Poet features Pat Riviere-Seel, a friend who graced my poetry class in the Great Smokies Writing Workshop several years ago.  Pat has become a vibrant presence in our North Carolina Literary community, offer her talents and her time to her readers and the literary organizations that help draw us all together.  Please join us at City Lights Bookstore on Feb. 16 at 10:30 to meet Pat and listen to her read and talk about her work.  Our gatherings are always informal and, yes, fun.  Afterward, I highly recommend lunch downstairs at City Lights Cafe!

Here is a poem of hers that I love.   You can find more on her website by clicking on the link above.

The Bears 

The bears returned last night.

 The mother and her three cubs 

slept in the mound of leaves. 

They left deep indentations

 where summer-sated bellies 

A snowy evening last winter.

and massive paws lay curled

 beneath the maple’s outstretched limbs

and the quarter moon’s pale light.

All day, while I raked leaves into piles,

 the bears were watching. They moved 

silent and unseen among evergreens,

 gray trunks, and branches as they had

all summer. Preparing for winter sleep, 

 they stuffed themselves on acorns and grubs.

One late summer day they came  into 

 the orchard. The cubs shimmied

up the young apple trees, bent 

 one bough to the ground and broke

another in their play. The mother

 took her time selecting fallen apples,

and those she could reach balanced 

 on her hind legs. She carried these

one by one to her cubs, gently 

 urged them to taste and chew. 

She knows how long winter lasts. 

   

Pat Riviere-Seel

Pat Riviere-Seel has published two poetry collections, The Serial Killer’s Daughter (Main Street Rag, 2009), winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry and No Turning Back Now (Finishing Line Press, 2004), nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She teaches poetry at UNCA in the Great Smokies Writing Program.

Pat is a 2003 graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Queens University of Charlotte. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Asheville Poetry Review, Passager, Tar River Poetry, and Kakalak, an Anthology of Carolina Poets, among others. Recent poems  appear in Boomtown, the Queens University MFA Program 10^th Anniversary Anthology, Cloudbank, and Poetry of Love, an anthology published by Jacar Press. 

Her poetry has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist in the Press 53 Open Awards and a semi-finalist in the first James Applewhite Poetry Prize in 2011. The Serial Killer’s Daughter premiered as a staged reading in March 2011 with a 4-member cast. 

Pat is a former award winning journalist, lobbyist, publicist, and editor. She worked as a political reporter for daily newspapers in Fayetteville, NC, and Annapolis, Maryland until 1987 when she established her own public and government relations firm. She represented nonprofit organizations in the Maryland General Assembly, designed public relations campaigns for private businesses and political candidates.

In 1992 she returned to her native North Carolina to take a position as Editor of Voices, the bimonthly journal of Rural Southern Voice for Peace. She married Ed Seel in 1997 and moved with him to Germany for two years. During that time, Pat attended the Spoleto Writers Workshop in Spoleto, Italy.

She has lived in Asheville, NC, since 1999 and served as President of the North Carolina Poetry Society and Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference. Pat is an avid runner, hiker, and gardener.

from  The Serial Killer's Daughter
Winner of the Roanoke Chowan Poetry Award from the NC Literary and Historical Association

I. About the Daughter
The serial killer's daughter hangs damp sheets on the line.
She likes the yeasty way the wind fills the cloth and how the sun sweetens the
threads.
When she holds the clothespins between her teeth, she tastes bread and salted butter.
She no longer worries about trying to hold on to the brass pole of the carousel.
The serial killer's daughter can hold anything - or anyone - she pleases.
Preferring familiar company, she surrounds herself with dahlias and lavender.
She always rides the wooden tiger because there is no bear.
Why are the animals always one step ahead of the humans?
The serial killer's daughter knows how frightening a creature walking upright can be, so
she always walks as if she were about to waltz.
Her hands write a language only she can read.
She's not a figment of anyone's imagination. 
She is sunlight striping murky swamp water.

II. More About the Serial Killer's Daughter




The serial killer's daughter wears tight curls made of cypress roots and washes them in
buttermilk from the moon.
When mud oozes between her toes she no longer worries about wiping her feet before
stepping through the door.
She likes to touch people she loves on the nape of the neck and feel the rocky landscapes
of their spines.
Her heart measures her intentions and stretches them in a chain around her wrist so she
will not forget.
The serial killer's daughter waits for no one.
It never matters if she is on time. Whose time?
Time is irrelevant, like memories she saves and forgets.
Because her life needs seasoning she grows spearmint, basil, and lemon balm.
The serial killer's daughter is always leaving Robeson County.
For her, the stone covered with moss and mica that she carries in
her pocket contains a galaxy.

(Available from Main Street Rag Press )

Guest Poet: Anora McGaha

Anora McGaha is my featured poet this week, come to spend some time in my kitchen, along with--yes--a frog!  She is fascinated by the natural world, and as you can see from the poem that follows, she finds poetry in it.  She now lives outside Raleigh, a transplanted Yankee who plans to stay in the South.   I think she knows that North Carolina is the best home a writer could have.  Anora gives a brief portrait of herself:

I was born in Boston and my grandparents home in Cambridge Massachusetts was the most constant home I knew. My father was a diplomat, and my mother was half Italian and half American, and the daughter of a diplomat. We grew up moving every 9 - 24 months around the Mediterranean. Studying a little Arabic, a lot of French, some Italian. I majored in Chinese at university, and did my time in the corporate world in Boston, New York,DC and Raleigh, and now have my own business doing writing and multi-media content development for online marketing and publicity. I've been writing poems since high school. I draw from many traditions, and have been influenced by too many languages and places and experiences.

Kitchen Keeper's Emerald

Frog-frog

leaps onto

the back door

window pane

every other night

Brown eyes peering

into the dark

white skinned belly

pressed against the glass

Little finger toe pads

gripping

as if made to belong

on the back deck door

Frog-frog’s pale throat

pulses like a baby

feeding

Waiting

for the flyers

to draw near 

the kitchen light 

slipping out

into the night

Frog-frog

embodies green

spring green

brilliant green

precious green

Exotic as

the rain forest

poison frogs

or the latest jewel-tone

enameled smart car

Frog-frog 

came from Cary

twice before

a guest at the Cary 

back deck door

Kitchen keeper

didn’t know he

made the move

to Apex

'Til

one winter morning

hidden in a pot

under rotting

dark browned leaves

a green as fine

as emeralds

Two years later

Kitchen keeper

left  the shades open

after sunset

and there he was

Frog-frog

on his sitting spot

on the deck door glass

Frog-frog doesn’t like

the camera’s flash

and springs away

like Barishnikov

in ballet

Nightly

Kitchen keeper

peers into the glass

that keeps the bugs

at bay

Hoping to see

North Carolina’s

leaping emerald

Frog-frog

July 30, 2011

Anora's frog

THE GIFT OF POETRY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Stephen E. Smith's A SHORT REPORT ON THE FIRE AT WOOLWORTHS

My friend Stephen Smith has published his Selected New and Old Poems, titled A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths, with Main Street Rag Press in Charlotte, NC. I'm happy to hear about this new book; Stephen is a poet whose work I've admired over the years. He's also been a mainstay of our state's literary community. Here are several poems from the book.

I'm hoping you'll want to order this one after you come to the end of this blog post!

ISBN: 978-1-59948-257-6
118 pages, $14

Stephen E. Smith was born in Easton, Maryland, in 1946. After graduating from Elon College, he attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he received his MFA in 1971. His poems, stories, columns, and reviews have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies. He is the author of seven previous books of poetry and prose and is the recipient the Poetry Northwest Young Poet's Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry, and four North Carolina Press awards. He lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina and contributes columns, reviews, and features toThe Pilot and PineStraw magazine.

Whatever There Was To Say

A sky the pallor of hands folded in a casket

You are driving south on Church Street this November

afternoon, and as you approach a railway crossing,

you notice a family, or what you believe

to be a family, walking the road—a man, a woman,

a boy, and a small girl, who is maybe eight.

The girl wears a blue print dress and is barefoot

in this late chill. And because the sky is the gray

of your grandmother’s hands, you recall how that

old woman embraced you years ago as you sat in the

Avalon Theatre watching the movie news, the face

of a shivering child, a girl about the age of this

small girl, waiting beside a death camp railway.

Your grandmother put her arms around you there in

the darkness and you were embarrassed, felt awkward:

an old woman clinging to you, a child of eight,

in a crowded theatre. But your grandmother is a long

time dead and you have come to understand that shoeless

children are, these days, simply shoeless children:

you’ve seen so many and so much worse.

Yet there is something about this family,

this child, her straight yellow hair cut

at such a ragged angle, the thin face, eyes set

deep in shadow. And her brother in a green cap,

her father, tight-waisted in blue trousers,

the mother in a heavy, white-flecked overcoat.

They carry plastic bags filled with aluminum cans

gathered from the roadsides and ditches. And haven’t

you seen these very faces in photographs of Jews,

Gypsies, Poles, eyes blank with resignation, fatigue,

awaiting the gas chamber, clutching their belongings—

as if those few scraps of cloth could be of some value

where they were going? You wonder about this family,

wonder if the future of this small girl is as clear

as the past in photographs. Wonder how these church

steeples dare to rise straight into the smoky skies

of this most terrible of centuries. How neatly they

weave themselves among the bare branches of oak and

sycamore! And haven’t you finally come to understand

that whatever there was to say cannot be said?

Which is probably what your grandmother was telling

you in the darkness of that long ago matinee

when she held you hard against her as you watched

that child shivering beside the death camp railway.

Remember how you tried to pull away and how she held

on tight, as if that simple, desperate gesture

might make any difference in such a world?

The Poet’s Photograph

When I see a poet’s photograph with the name

of the photographer printed below in tiny letters,

why do I believe that the poet and the photographer

were once lovers? It is a ridiculous assumption.

Maybe the poet paid to have his photograph taken,

though I know this is seldom the case, or perhaps

the photographer was a faithful admirer of poets

and poetry, pleased to have been included in some

discreet yet significant way. And why when the poet’s

wife snapped the shutter, do I believe they haven’t

been lovers in decades, a more likely assumption?

And what of the photograph of the poet reading,

lean body bent over the lectern, his left hand

grasping air, his face drawn with intensity,

how is it I know he went home with the photographer,

an attractive widow whose dead husband was

a kindly but obscure botanist who toppled one

spring morning into a variety of pinkish day lily

which bore his name, that after the cocktail party

she invited the poet to see her collection of rare

paraphernalia and that they tossed back a couple

of bourbons and tumbled straight away into the sack

where the poet recited Donne’s “Love’s Progresse”

and kissed gently her plump toes?

I’m sure it was raining that October night,

a warm panging on the tin roof, the lingering

scent of cinnamon air freshener, a blue neon light

flashing from the bar across the street, and that

in the morning they were both embarrassed, the poet

taking his leave somewhat awkwardly, and that he

never thought of the widow again until he opened a

letter forwarded to him in Greece where he was

languishing sans inspiration: Came across this

photograph—can it be so many years?—and thought

you might like it. I am married now to a botanist,

a kindly man who cannot make love because of recurrent

atrial fibrillation. Will you be reading in this area soon?

And the poet studied the photograph of someone

who seemed a stranger and thought: the perfect

likeness for my next book.

Loose Talk

An article in this morning’s Observer,

like other articles I’ve chance to read

on the life of Jane Mansfield,

notes that she was decapitated

when the car in which she was riding

crashed into a truck north of New Orleans.

This is what everyone who recalls

the buxom blonde remembers immediately—

like the neighbor who can tell you

that Walt Whitman was a homosexual

or that Catherine the Great

was a nymphomaniac who practiced bestiality.

The publicity photograph which

accompanies this article is not true to fact

or life: Mansfield is a brunette, smiling

a thick-lipped Monroe smile and thrusting

her breasts into the camera lens.

What would she have us believe—lover,

innocent, earthmother? In a faded tintype,

Whitman has gathered children about him.

He is affectionate, tender, ingenuous,

passionate, but certainly unaware of the

prurient obsessions which will one day

distort his finest lines. And who is

to say for sure that Catherine the Great

had a thousand lovers and left a poor

aroused pony dangling from the palace ceiling?

I wonder about the bewildered

man who came across a headless Jane Mansfield

on a highway north of New Orleans.

Did he recall the yellowing issue of Playboy

that lay creased beneath his mattress?

Could he see, if only for an instant, her nude

body arching, nipples erect, lips pursed?

Did he wonder: Is this twitching flesh

the very same? Did he ever find

the simple words to speak a simple truth?

Cleaning Pools

To my father

That summer you hired out to clean swimming pools

up and down Delmarva in your Willys truck,

the back end clanking with pumps and pipes,

cans of HTH, diatomaceous earth and alum,

and hauled me along to skim from the chlorined

waters hopeless, deluded toads and the clotted

bodies of insects.

I was ten that summer but can remember

how the surface of each pool was a surprise,

the water still clear or gone cloudy,

the blue bottoms flecked with algae

and the shimmering coins I retrieved for baloney

sandwiches and sodas at the Royal Oak Grocery.

You’d place a hand on my shoulder and say,

“Dive deep and get us that lunch money.”

Do you recall the August afternoon at the Talbot

County Country Club, the thirty-six filter bags

we pulled and laundered, the steel rings so tight

our fingers bled? It was a five-hour job

and when the bags and screens were back in place,

you dropped a pipe wrench clanging to the bottom.

It was five more hours in the high beams

and neither of us spoke till the filter

lid was clamped and screwed down tight.

Then we leaned against the truck and shared

a warm soda. Sheet lightning streaked

over the Chesapeake, and I began to notice

how after each flash, I went momentarily blind.

“It’s strange,” you said, finally, and without

my having spoken a word, “how quickly the pupil

closes to the light and how complete the darkness is.

It must be like dying.”

Tonight I watch a storm gather over Carolina,

the lightning so intense the billowing undersides

of clouds are illumined from horizon to horizon,

each flash stealing me into shadow. Perhaps,

as you said, it is like death, this sudden light

and inevitable darkness. Or perhaps it is the

purest grace. It says what fathers and sons

mostly cannot say: It is the quick chill of a hand

on my shoulder, it’s like plunging deep

into the pure, blue waters of the rich.

THE GIFT OF POETRY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Joseph Bathanti's RESTORING SACRED ART

It's not too late to order books of poetry for holiday gifts. Even if they arrive after Christmas, there's always New Years Eve, right? A book of poetry, along with a bottle of champagne, would be the perfect way to begin 2011.

Joseph Bathanti's new book of poems, RESTORING SACRED ART, shows again how Bathanti's work continues to grow in power and resonance. This collection can be ordered from Star Cloud Press at http://www.starcloudpress.com/RestoringSacredArt.html. Below, two poems from the book wait to be savored.

ISBN: 978-1-932842-39-5 (cloth edition)
ISBN: 978-1-932842-40-1 (paperback edition)
Publisher: Star Cloud Press
Year of Publication: 2010
Format: Cloth Edition or Paperback
Page Count: 126 (paperback)



"Joseph Bathanti is a strong, eloquent voice in American poetry. His poems emanate from deep within himself and his culture, a world of rich ethnic ties and associations. I love the luminous details that he uncovers, again and again, like holy mysteries. His poems, which often deal — overtly and covertly — with religious themes, are restorative. These are, indeed, poems of restoration. Bathanti returns often to the well of memory, and he draws a fresh, sweet water from those depths."
—Jay Parini, The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems and Benjamin's Crossing


"I am enraptured by the poems in Restoring Sacred Art, Joseph Bathanti's volume of love/hate poems about growing up and contending with the physicality of Pittsburgh, that unforgettable city. The language is rich, metropolitan, and accomplished, resounding with the poet's deep memories of friendship, family, neighborhood, school agonies, old cars, Catholicism, games, fights, binges, discoveries, hard jobs, affections, memories of a place and time. The stories and lines are artfully constructed, building to the moving conclusion of the book, when the poet returns annually to visit his people and remember the city. He never stops saying goodbye."
—Paul Zimmer, Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems and Trains In the Distance

JOSEPH BATHANTI is the author of five books of poetry:Communion Partners, Anson County, The Feast of All Saints, This Metal (nominated for the National Book Award), andLand of Amnesia. His first novel, East Liberty, won the 2001 Carolina Novel Award. His latest novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello Literary Award. His book of stories, The High Heart, won the 2006 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. He is the recipient of Literature Fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1994 (poetry) and 2009 (fiction), the Sherwood Anderson Award, and many others. He teaches atAppalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Restoring Sacred Art

We ease the statue out of the Chrysler trunk.

Stiff as a mob hit, she smiles,

her tattered robe della robia,

the nimbus studded with a star tiara.

In her arms, the smirking Christ-

child is lean and grim, in one hand

a ball with a cross planted in it,

the other held up like a boy scout's pledge.

I grab his mother in a headlock.

Philip takes the feet;

and we shuffle down Liberty Avenue:

Saturday night, the bars' glass-brick

windows lit with neon Iron City Light beer signs,

one Italian joint after another,

the spars of Saint Joseph's Cathedral shooting off

into the sky like wild onions.

We set her down for a minute at the foot

of Phil's studio and light cigarettes.

Four flights, fifteen steps each, straight up.

She stands there on the sidewalk,

holding the baby, gazing at Saint Joe's,

The Catholic Store, Mineo's Pizza,

the halogens twirling off across

the Bloomfield Bridge toward the Bishop's house.

The kid doesn't like it: the thrum

and noise, the lights. He's lived

all his life in a church.

We hoist them again and begin the climb,

pausing at each landing to rest, and crack at Mary:

You've got to lose some weight.

Too many cannolis.

When are you going to start exercising?

We offer her a smoke.

At the top, we wrestle her inside.

Phil turns on the light.

The baby has lost those two fingers;

only the thumb remains,

jutting out of the fist like a hitchhiker's.

He wants down. In the full light,

Mary is wan, tired, the smile thinning.

She has trouble holding her son.

Her eyes are wet; her lips quiver.

This is not unusual, my friend tells me,

gesturing about his workroom

where other virgin mothers,

nicked and beat-up, missing limbs and noses,

awaiting restoration,

hold tightly to their squirming children,

trying to hush them, their tears

like gravel hitting the linoleum.

Domenico Giuseppe

Singled from the queue filing

through airport security,

my 90 year old father is fully cooperative,

even amiable; not even surprised, it seems,

that fate has tapped him on the shoulder

to answer for something he is innocent of.

Two uniformed buxom matrons,

coiled hair and black patent leather

Sam Browns, heart-shaped

silver badges, ask him

if he’s accepted anything from strangers

since he’s entered the terminal.

He assures them he never accepts things from strangers.

They study him as if his affability

is part of the ploy, a filament

wired to the bomb he’ll trigger.

They prod over him an electric wand,

slip him out of his overcoat, shake his cane.

He smiles and calls them young lady.

He’s ordered to remove his shoes,

a pair of white Addidas,

not a scuff upon them; and his hat,

an old brown fedora they flip over

and over and empty of its nothingness,

before patting him down like a convict,

armpits and crotch, sliding

their hands up and down his arms and legs,

each skeletal ridge and knob

as if by magic he might divide

and reveal the vault of Armageddon.

Suddenly my father is terrible as Isaiah.

Yet he remains smiling, even as they strip him,

tottering naked on bare yellow feet,

white hair smoking off his chest,

millwright’s legs tungsten blue,

from him emanating an audible tick.

Then they peel him out of his skin,

jackknife him open:

sprung, mis-spliced wires,

capped sockets, taped frays –

the mysterious circuitry of detonation.

Still they don’t find what they’re searching for,

and he can’t remember

where he’s hidden it.

Wheeling

Driving a girl whose father loathed me,

son of an Italian who labored on the open hearth,

I crossed in a borrowed green Comet

the PA line into Wheeling.

Eighteen was legal in West Virginia:

Marlboros and three-two beer at the Hilltop

on a street with whorehouses and a Jesuit college.

She was sixteen, a minor –

the true miners secreted in black sulphurous pockets

whispering beneath the tavern floor we sat upon.

The jukebox was loud and country;

it was easy to ignore the charge being laced under us.

My girl was drunk and singing along – Loretta Lynn,

Tammy Wynette – though she didn’t know the words,

the way folks mouth like speaking in tongues

when the spirit lays hold of them.

A smudge on her cheek,

second-hand coat, her blonde hair shone white –

in that light,

aged into a coal miner’s wife

or a steel worker’s

like my mother.

When the 4 to12 shift from Wheeling Pittsburgh

dragged in, I smelled asbestos

and baked ore, the vaporous green sizzle

of my father’s work fatigues.

I wanted to tell her all about her father;

I’d rip him to pieces, that bastard.

My dad was a brave man,

He climbed boom cranes with nothing but a span of leather

fastening him above the smokestacks

streaming twelve stories of fire into the firmament.

But I had no vocabulary to render his mythic toil.

I knew more about her dad:

his suits and office in downtown Pittsburgh,

his perfect diction and college education.

We hung around till Last Call,

then kissed against the fender until the lot emptied

and the Hilltop’s neon shingle sputtered out.

The Comet wouldn’t start.

I turned it over and over until I killed the battery,

till I couldn’t get a peep out of the horn

or the lights to flicker.

The mighty Ohio beat by.

Whelped in Pittsburgh,

it loops north, in defiance of gravity,

abruptly slices west, southering

into the fang of northern West Virginia

that impales the border

of Ohio and Pennsylvania –

like the long jagged neck of a busted bottle.

That’s where we stood clinging to each other,

stranded along the omniscient river –

where I still like to think of us –

before those miners, like escaped Purgatorians,

burst black and smoldering

through the bottom of our lives,

and she started to cry,

anticipating her father’s patrician wrath.

I thought of who I could call –

knowing there was only one man on earth

who would rise out of his exhausted sleep

at the sound of my voice,

like Lazarus, and come running.