Franklin Public Library hosts WCU Literary Festival Authors

The Franklin Public Library will host three events celebrating the WCU Literary Festival that occurs during the first full week of April. I will be reading and discussing my book Coming to Rest on Sunday afternoon, March 27 at 2:00. Please go to this link to find more information about these events: http://www.fontanalib.org/pdfs/literary-festival-Franklin-2011.pdf.

Coming to Rest

1.

The Name

Because she’d not bury

the name with the dead child,

she made her surviving five children

swear they’d pass it on

to the first daughter born to them.

Another name for letting go.

Or holding on.

Another name for home.

2.

Birthday Ghazal

Why this old Persian form for today, of all days?

Why not sonnet or blank verse to help me take hold?

Down to the wire goes the season’s gold,

late this year, so long it took to take hold.

I don’t care that my days tumble down

to the compost pile. I want to look, to take hold.

Seize the day. Carpe Diem, if you like.

Bite down hard on the hook and take hold.

Down the creek float the leavings of what I once was.

Just a girl. Mostly waiting for luck to take hold.

Last night rain kept the roof busy scolding

me, wake up you dumb cluck and take hold.

I’ve already answered my e-mail, my voice

mail, my snail mail. My real work? To take hold.

Kathryn died too young. Age twelve. Now she tolls

in the dust of my name: to come back, to take hold.

3.

Sinking

The aunt I was named after died too young.

She sank at age twelve

into diabetic pneumonia. Then coma,

too pretty a word for her dying. Why cling

to another old form like this no-holds-

barred song for my aunt who died too young

to care about romance? What good is a song

now, to her? Or to me? Maybe I’ve grown too old

for such artifice, as if I’m trapped in a coma

of middle-aged dullness. My tongue

slips on names. But not hers. But why dwell

on her death. So she died, much too young,

not all like an angel who could do no wrong,

not at all blonde & pretty as I had been told.

When she sank into that final coma,

she must have looked ugly. I can’t make this

villanelle sing, no matter what I’ve been told

about Kathryn, who died too young,

years before insulin, of diabetic pneumonia.

4.

Stuck

She smoothes her skirt and squints at me.

I don’t know what to say. Or why she’s come.

The clock’s stopped ticking on the wall. Back home

again, she sees what I see, same old creek

reflecting nothing but a sky where trees

fish with their lines of moss all day. Let’s thumb

a ride to town, she dares. Let’s make the phone lines hum

above these droughty fields. Now that I’m free

I’m getting out of here. She says she wants to hear

the latest gossip, wants to have a little fun.

She tells me everything that hangs around

too long gets stuck. I nod. I don’t dare

ask her why she’s here, this dust I’ve stirred from

sleep. This shell of light. This sullen hologram.

5.

Free

This nameless creek

almost obscured by shade

where she was last seen

by the camera lens

keeps rushing through me

as she hikes her skirt

and stands wanting to be

brave enough to walk

into the current,

sickly girl whose cropped

hair won’t blow

in the summer

wind, too short,

too short, she cries,

coming to rest

in the photograph.

REMEMBERING MARCH WIND THROUGH ORGANDY CURTAINS

March has come in like a lion, blowing the clouds around like sheets on a clothesline. I call up a poem I wrote about remembering my grandmother again and again, her bloomers that swelled with wind on the clothesline, alongside her nightgowns and bedsheets. Her organdy curtains the wind teased when she opened the windows still bloom in my memory.

Again

I lie down in her sea bed that bears

me back home to the nothing left

after her house burned around it.

Her lavender handkerchief knotted

round nickels and dimes. On her dresser

a brooch in the shape of a peacock’s tail.

Organdy curtains that breathed in

and out when she opened the windows

for March to blow through like a lioness

stalking the boxwoods or a lamb bleating

out by the pump house. Her hairpins

sown over the rugs. Her voluminous apron.

Her false teeth that grinned

every night from a tall iced-tea glass

as she pulled off her house dress,

her shimmy, her bloomers

that even now swell like a mainsail with

nothingness. Lorna Doone shortbread

she nibbled till she fell asleep, leaving crumbs

in the bed sheets like sand from the white beach

at Panama City whenever I crawled into bed

with her body that smelled of the ocean

at low tide and tasted of salt

when she pulled me too close to her.

from COMING TO REST

LSU Press Poetry Series, 2006

TENT DREAM

Knife edge blue sky and sun on the winter-weary rhododendron leaves make me long for a campsite, a tent staked upon it, with night falling and woodfire kindling.

This poem is from Coming to Rest (LSU Press) and is part of the sequence Singing to Salt Woman.

Tent Dream

Bring your knife and your coloring book,

an old woman’s voice said,

so I tried to follow. I knew

day was waiting downriver. I heard

many voices advise me along the way,

mumbling in ancient Apache

or old-country Gaelic, a shudder

of Gullah tongues parting the salt

water. Native or non-native,

sometimes we hear the same voices,

like Zuni corn chanting

my grandmother up from the dust

into one last day walking her bean-rows

and suddenly so much green

singing around me, I take out my knife

and cut through to daylight.

The Zuni people call her Ma’l Oyattsik’i, the Salt Woman. For the moment she rests peacefully in her domain, a gentle refuge nestled among purple mesas, lush grasses, and tenacious trees. Zuni oral history tells how she used to live closer to the Zuni people, but grew angry with them and moved far away to Zuni Salt Lake, 50 miles south of the Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico. For centuries, great pilgrimages have been undertaken by the men, not only of Zuni, but of neighboring Acoma Pueblo, the Navajo, the Apache, and others, to collect salt for their ceremonial life.

from an essay by Winona LaDuke

MEMORIAL DAY

Precious Little “

“... the passageway down which they had just gone was bright as the eye of a needle.”

Eudora Welty, Losing Battles

So we’d gathered to talk about writing,

remembering great ones who’d recently gone

from our midst and the various ways

they had followed each voice through

the needle’s eye into the clearing of art,

when a novelist slouched

on the front row opined

that the only real subject is battle

and how men survive it.

I seethed while my student poets,

all of them women, sat waiting for someone

to challenge his vision of literature,

belligerent canon

where warring tribes battle it out

in their epics and blood-spattered novels.

“Miss Welty,” I countered, “stayed

clear of the battlefield, if you recall.

She sat down every day at the same desk

and made language raise the world up

from the grave of our common amnesia.”

He barely acknowledged

my comment. He wanted to flirt.

with my students. He shrugged at me,

stood up and showed off the fit

of his tight jeans. My god,

what a chasm he opened up right there

between us: we stared like combatants

across the trench, loading our weapons,

his now on full frontal display,

along with a first novel already lobbed

to reviewers by Random House. As for me,

middle-aged poet, what were mine?

Precious little. The shot I recalled

having seen months ago of a woman my age

holding up to the camera a photo of daughter

or sister or good friend who’d disappeared

into the rubble of felled towers, the same woman

I had seen sifting through ruins in Fallujah

or Kabul, even now cringing

when she hears the gunfire in Baghdad,

a woman who stares back at me

when I’m dusting my daughter’s face

framed on the shelf,

smiling out at a day that’s been gone

for so long I can barely remember it,

nothing much going on, no bombs,

no fireworks, just late summer afternoon

and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.

(from COMING TO REST, LSU Press, 2005)

GOOD REVIEWS: A Celebration

What is a "good" review? It's one that's intelligent, one that can read to the heart of a book and speak honestly about what that book is trying to do. It is not mean-spirited or shallow. It takes its task seriously. This is such a review, by a young poet named Luke Johnson. Several light years beyond the review in coldfront to which I brought some gypsy humor several months back, wouldn't you say?

Coming to Rest By Kathryn Stripling Byer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. $16.95 (pa.)
THE HOLLINS CRITIC
By Luke Johnson

In her latest collection, Coming to Rest, North Carolina’s poet laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer creates a fluid landscape with her poems. The voice in these pieces travels from coast to coast as well as abroad, refusing to rest in a singular present moment. In doing so, the collection arrives at a more circular pursuit of history, “each now forever” as Byer writes in the poem “The Still Here and Now.” It is through creating a circle of family and feelings that these poems search for home, not merely as a place, but as an intangible sense: the slow familiarity of “late summer afternoon / and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.” Though the collection paints many pictures, it is the relationships that Byer presents rather than the landscapes that cultivate a ghostly, but very real sense of home.

In the title poem, Byer wrestles with the legacy of a namesake she never knew while openly questioning her choice of form in the first two sections, one of which is a ghazal and the other a villanelle: “Why cling / to another old form like this no-holds- / barred song for my aunt who died too young.” The revelation of these poetic choices establishes a trend in the collection, drawing the reader into the creative process. By being more closely aligned with the mind of the poet, the reader cannot help but also be in tune with the emotions of the poem. In the final section of the poem, entitled “Free,” Byer returns once again to the physical world, tying her relationship with her aunt to a “nameless creek / almost obscured by shade.” It is in the creek that Byer can reconcile her aunt’s “coming to rest” with Byer’s own continuing struggle with guilt, standing midstream in the water that “keeps rushing through [her].”

One of the finest poems in the collection appears in the final section, a tribute to Robert Watson entitled “Exotics.” Polished and well-crafted, the poem drives toward a relationship heretofore untouched, that of the student-mentor. While this relationship has little to do with the physical space of a house, to a writer it seems as though it is an instrumental step along the way to creating a feeling of home. It is in this environment that Byer recognizes the manner in which a person can take hold of one’s imagination, just as easily as a place: “I confess I have gone nowhere. / I’m still caught inside the same lines I’ve been trying / to write since we walked to Bob’s class.” Through remembering an old classroom with a brilliant professor, Byer creates in the poem a safe space, a peaceful enclave.

What results in Coming to Rest is a “hymn to the landscape,” a collection that digs beneath the dirt from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to the roadside of Interstate 65, and beyond. Byer’s poems scour the past and ultimately leave the reader at once vulnerable and whole, awake to one’s own fragility and aware of the landscape’s ability to be. Byer conveys that home is not merely a place, but a meditation on the moments of quiet that can be found amidst the uproar of everyday.




(silkscreen by my friend Gayle Woody)

BIRTHDAY GHAZAL

BIRTHDAY GHAZAL


Why this old Persian form for today, of all days?
Why not sonnet or blank verse to help me take hold?

Down to the wire goes the season’s gold,
late this year, so long it took to take hold.

I don’t care that my days tumble down
to the compost pile. I want to look, to take hold.

Seize the day. Carpe Diem, if you like.
Bite down hard on the hook and take hold.

Down the creek float the leavings of what I once was.
Just a girl. Mostly waiting for luck to take hold.

Last night rain kept the roof busy scolding
me, wake up you dumb cluck and take hold.

I’ve already answered my e-mail, my voice
mail, my snail mail. My real work? To take hold.

Kathryn died too young. Age twelve. Now she tolls
in the dust of my name: to come back, to take hold.

(from COMING TO REST, LSU Press)


The ghazal has a long and storied history in Persian and Islamic literature. Now it is becoming part of our own. The late contemporary Kashmiri-American poet Aga Shahid Ali wrote several beautiful ghazals, in the traditional form. Adrienne Rich's "Blue Ghazals" are looser in their construction but well worth reading. And there is more to learn about this difficult, yet evocative form. I hope readers will do some exploration on this topic.