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.

WAKE: poems after 9/11

(UA Flight 175 crashing into the Twin Towers)

Here are a few poems from my chapbook Wake, published by Spring Street Editions in 2002. It's available online, signed by the author, from City Lights books at www.citylightsnc.com.

Safe

I knew no one who perished.

For that I am grateful.

My nephew had moved from the city a year ago.

My friends lived or worked blocks away from Ground Zero.

One watched from her office the small bodies leaping.

Another stepped onto the street as the second plane circled.

Out of the subway another climbed into a sky of glass falling.

The scrolls of their e-mails continued for days.

Again and again I try not to imagine myself onto either plane,

the continent stretching before me,

out there on the edge of it, sun just beginning to rise.

Seat belts off.

Scent of fresh coffee, the rattle of carts...

Here nothing flies into my windows but birds.

They have lain in my daughter’s palms,

pressed to her chest for the warmth of her beating heart,

until their broken-necked bodies grew cold,

and she looked up at me, as if asking, What now?

And I answered, Now go wash your hands.

Ruth and Juliana McCourt were passengers on Flight 175.

Critique

for Susan Lefler

and the memory of Ruth and Juliana McCourt

1.

Your image of angels attending the ruins

fails to move me.

I try to imagine their presence,

but over and over the plane burrows

into the tower of steel and glass,

bodies of flesh and blood,

the newsreel eternally rolling,

the morning indelibly sunny and crisp.

2.

So much God talk these days

I am almost afraid to ask, Where

was He? Too busy pouring the wine

for a new round of martyrs? Inspecting the sheen

on his solid gold cobblestones? Meanwhile

the plane gleamed in His holy firmament,

held, like the sparrows of old, in the palm of His hand,

in its cockpit, the young men who prayed

to be gathered up into the silk tents of Paradise.

3.

What more to say?

That tonight I am wary of angels

unfurling their wings like the flags I see brandished

from buildings and vehicles,

pasted like band-aids on freshly washed chrome.

That I ask of a poem only this:

Give me dust unto dust.

Let the pulse of it be nothing less than

their requiem, even as they enter into

the sky shining off those sheer towers.

4.

Held tight

in her mother’s arms,

she hears it,

blood beat

she once slept beneath

before ever

her mother had

whispered her name.

Juliana,

5.

the jig

of it still

on my tongue.

NAMING THE CONSTELLATIONS: John Thomas York

John York's splendid new book, Naming the Constellations: New Poems, has just been published by Spring Street Editions, in collaboration with Ash Creek Press in Portland, Oregon. York's daughter Rachel painted the cover image for the chapbook, and Fred Chappell, Mark Smith-Soto, and Al Maginnes provided testimonials.

A native North Carolinian, John has served his home state well as both public school teacher and poet. He has received the Teacher of the Year award from the NC English Teachers Association as well as the Poet Laureate Award from the NC Poetry Society. He has published his work in two previous chapbooks, as well as in numerous journals. I've featured him several times in blog posts both on Here, Where I Am and My Laureate's Lasso.

These poems by John Thomas York recall to vivid life a mode of existence that has well nigh disappeared. His pliant lyricism is born from a deep love of country things, country people, and the country itself in the widest meaning of that term. It is a country the poet says he did not return to, "for the land lives in me, the kingdom come." That's true--and what a grand kingdom it is!

--------Fred Chappell

York was born in Winston-Salem in 1953 and grew up on a dairy farm in Yadkin County. He was educated at Appalachian State, Wake Forest, Duke, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he earned an MFA in Creative Writing. He has also been a Mellon Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a recipient of fellowships from the Council for Basic Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities. For over thirty years he has taught English in the public schools. In 2003 he was named Teacher of the Year by NCETA. John York and his wife, Jane McKinney York, teach at Penn-Griffin School for the Arts, in High Point, a magnet school in the Guilford County system.

His work has appeared in many regional journals, including Greensboro Review: He won that magazine's Literary Award for Poetry in 1985. He has previously published two chapbooks, Picking Out (Nebo Poetry Press, 1982) and Johnny's Cosmology (The Hummingbird Press of Winston-Salem, 1994).

Naming the Constellations is the third book published by Spring Street Editions, of Sylva, NC, in association with Ash Creek Press, of Portland, Oregon. Spring Street has also published chapbooks by Kathryn Stripling Byer and Mary Adams.

(John York, NC Teacher of the Year, at the NC English Teachers Banquet in Winston-Salem)

To order the chapbook, please contact City Lights Bookstore of Sylva:

http://www.citylightsnc.com/

Or you may order directly from the author:

John T. York, 804 Westover Terrace, Greensboro, NC 27408

We at Spring Street Editions do not use amazon.com, preferring to work instead with Indie bookstores at indiebound.com.

Price is $12, plus $2.00 postage.

Visit us on facebook.

Here are three poems from John's new book.

June

One morning, I walked down

the ditch between young corn and shining gravel,

cool white sand

lovely to my uncalloused feet.

I shuffled toward the giant trees hanging

over the road,

walked right into a shower of music,

as strange as the melodies picked up by radio

telescopes--music from the stars.

I couldn’t see any aliens,

but I knew their hymn—how wide the sky

was my rough translation,

or maybe the visitors

were merely chirping, laughing at a dirty

blond boy: a wingless creature,

how slowly and quietly he moves.

I could tell they were the true rulers of the universe,

making radiant the worm,

the grasshopper, the morning glory--

the singers’ babel a blessing,

telling everything to grow.

Puzzle

My father quit the farm

one piece at a time:

Kate, the old mule, gone one day,

no word of her destination,

then the cows, thirty-five Holsteins,

sold to a man who didn’t know their names,

the tractors, the tall John Deere,

the Ford, John’s little buddy,

the wagon rolling on slick tires,

a yellow cultivator splotched by rust,

the antique seed drill,

iron-spoked wheels higher than my head,

a disk harrow, a bull-tongued plow,

the tobacco sleds waiting for summer,

the mowing machine whose teeth

chattered through the alfalfa on the hottest days

and the raking machine that churned

hay into orderly rows,

the manure spreader, orange wagon

splattered black, blades clotted thick,

the two-seated tobacco planter,

its twin trays, belts, and hoses,

the sprinklers, the muddy pump like half

a tractor, the irrigation pipes.

I would come home from school

and the landscape would be changed

in a subtle way

I refused to understand,

the pastures, too quiet, the growing

vacancy in the machinery shed.

One cold Saturday,

my father out for a long haul,

my sister helping my mother pack,

I wandered about the farm,

down to the bridge, along the creek,

the pasture fence, the red boundary flags,

up to the highest hill, where I could look

over the farm and see Mt. Nebo in the distance.

I was looking for a missing piece,

the edges invisible but sharp:

the wind passed through me, as if

I were a wood stove, left there by the road,

the door left open, the wind

lowing over a rusty pipe.

Teaching Time

Jack must’ve climbed a corn stalk--for by the time I heard rumor

of school starting, the rows marched up the hill and the leaders

hid their tassel tops in a cloud’s belly. I would’ve laughed

at gravity and followed Jack, but then Claude Jester came

running from the tobacco barn, just as the wind blew

a wrinkled piece of tin over his head: the thunder

boomed and that was the end of summer: Mom

said, “Soon we’ll need to buy you some green

jeans and new shirts, Johnny,” and I worried

that my friends would have forgotten my

name, it had been so long since May.

That rainy afternoon, Mama let me

play with a clock she used for

teaching time. I spun the

blue minute hand around

the red hours, I dreamed

through the years, until

I had a wife and three

daughters. When the

girls were little, we

liked to go to the

science museum,

and there we

dropped pennies

into a slot that

sent the coins

circling in a big

yellow funnel,

we watched

them gain

momentum,

the years

speeding up,

each penny

finishing in

a blur, a

rising whir,

and then

clink

POETRIO: MARY ADAMS AND RHETT ISEMAN TRULL

Mary Adams reads from Commandment at this month's Poetrio.

Every month Malaprop's Bookstore features Poetrio, a gathering of poets, usually three, reading from their work on a Sunday afternoon. This month two of the featured poets were friends,

Mary Adams and Rhett Iseman Trull, along with William Swarts, someone I had the pleasure to meet at the reading. Mary's chapbook Commandment was published last fall by Spring Street Editions in Sylva, and Rhett's first book The Real Warnings was published recently by Anhinga Press.

Mary has been a friend for many years, first as a colleague at WCU and later as, well, a friend and sister poet, animal lover, and partaker of wine and pizza whenever we can get together. Her fist book, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, was published by the U. of Florida Press. She is also a Milton scholar and expert in just about everything literary. I've devoted several posts to her, so I'll include the links-- http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/search?q=Mary+Adams. You may order her chapbook and her full length collection from City Lights Bookstore.

Rhett is editor par excellence of the new poetry journal Cave Wall, which she manages with her fabulous husband Jeff. She's a graduate of the MFA program in writing at UNC-Greensboro and a favorite of my ole friend Fred Chappell. I featured her as Poet of the Week last year on my laureate blog, so if you want to read more, which you certainly should, you should go to http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/2009/04/poet-of-week-rhett-iseman-trull.html

The third poet was William Swarts, whose book Strickland Plains has just been released. I'd not met Bill till this Sunday, but I can tell you that he will be the featured guest at Coffee With the Poets at City Lights Bookstore in the fall.

Here are some photos from this Sunday's Poetrio. Many thanks to Alsace and Virginia for making this series so enjoyable!

Mary responding to an unseen interrogator!

Mary's lovely mother Betty, on hand to hear her daughter read.

Rhett talks with members of the audience after her reading.

Rhett Trull signs the Malaprop's reader's registry.



In a dark cafe the author and friends drink to the publication of her chapbook and her reading at Malaprop's. (Actually it's Jack of the Woods, and it's dark because my flash wasn't working.)

POET OF THE DAY: MARY ADAMS

My friend Mary Adams is such a good poet that words fail me. But they never seem to fail her.

So, it's not surprising that Spring Street Editions, in collaboration with Ash Creek Press in Portland Oregon, has launched its chapbook series with WCU professor Mary Adams’s Commandment. Mary’s first book, Epistles From the Planet Photosynthesis, was published in the University of Florida Press’s poetry series. Her work has earned her a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. These new poems show her to be one of the finest formalists writing today. Former NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell says, “I have read with great admiration and genuine enjoyment the poems in this chapbook. “ He praisesThe intricate overlaying of separate landscapes and timeframes in the poems, their often “Dantean” focus, and concludes by saying that he will be re-reading this collection with pleasure, “going back and forth amongst the poems because I think I hear echoes.They seem linked to me and Commandment a whole. Congratulations on a fine performance!” Ron Rash praises the book, saying” Frew contemporary poets can match her combination of craft and feeling, which makes this new collection all the more welcome. She is a poet of the first rank.”

Commandment

By Mary Adams

When we were lonely

Love doubly

blessed us. Earth

filled us. Birth

welled like morning,

clean yearning

poured over the void

and we said

nothing could quiet this

urge, this riot, this

self-forgetfulness.

And then the doe

so wild going so

still, saw the brink

of wilderness sink

in our plenty, our

pity. Oceans for

which we longed dried

and our best laid

the world waste:

it wasn’t just

never enough love

that Jesus suffocated of.

TIME CATS
-- after Mr. Lloyd Alexander, 1924-2007


To console you for growing old, I got you a gift
to take you out of time. Not poems, which are always
ending after they start. And not knitting,
which if worn you might wear out. The best
gifts are light, but not too light, and flow
everywhere, like the ache of debt. This year
your gift should signify the infinite.
So I got you kittens, tricked by your own fingers
from the wild. Because they compound eternally,
but warmer. Because a single box contains
all kittens till it’s opened. Because a kitten
mewing makes a butterfly make a tornado.
Because a knotting of kittens extends in a plane
forever. Because a dying kitten is
impossibly light, and a lost kitten’s cry
is bottomless. And since each kitten wells
with the cat of danger, we know every cat
wears kittens like an urge. None is ever
really lost. Then cats point both ways always.
Now you are grown, here are all your kittens,
new again, like money you found in the laundry.
Heft them gently. Feel in their small hearts
your trembling. Calm them in the morning
of your fears. When you are sad, speak
them like cadences, kitten of cross-fire,
kitten of backflip, kitten of glory, kitten of
clutching, kitten of pestering and plummet, spindly
kitten, hungry kitten, kitten of solace.