A CELEBRATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR AND THE MUSIC OF THE DEEP SOUTH

Growing up in the deep South, I heard a lot of story-telling, on front porches, on the party-line, in kitchens, in beauty shops.   But the singing I heard (outside of church, I mean) was sung by our black neighbors and farm workers.  Background music, I grew up thinking of it, but when my friend, poet doris davenport, scolded me, saying, "We are tired of being background music for white people," I realized she was right, and more important, that I was wrong in thinking of that singing as "background music."  It was, as Evie Shockley sings in her poem, "a background in music. " 

On this day when we celebrate the life and words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I remember those voices, how their songs wove their way into my deepest self without my knowing it, and how I am still trying to learn how to harmonize with them.  

   Legato

.”..we sang everything there was to say.”

doris

                                             ---Evie Shockley

---a background in music  (from the new black, Wesleyan U.P.)

Evie

When the bell 

rang out noontime,

they lounged under oak trees
and drank from a mason jar

sweet tea    the taste

of a lemon slice lingering

at stovetops

and wash basins

cradles

and deathbeds

their voices kept

rising and falling 

like wind riffling 

cotton fields  

folding sheets

scrubbing floors,

spinning mayhaw juice

into a red thread

they were all the time

 singing

but we didn't listen

because it was backdrop

to what we sang

back ground

and ground back into

darkest leaf mold

that covered 

the root of our other

life     theirs

with which we never learned

how to harmonize.

Pembroke Magazine, 2012

With Doll, Patsy, and Lois, at a wedding celebration for Lois's son. 

RIVER VOICES

The Flint River surges along its journey a mere three miles from the farm where I grew up.   The town of Newton, Georgia lies along its banks and the old Newton Bridge used to be the object of great trepidation when we would drive over it.  One-lane and ramshackle (or so it sounded) it always caused us womenfolk to worry that a truck would come our way and force us into the muddy depths.  "Don't look down," my mother would warn.  What might we see if we did?

This poem, in the ancient Persian form of the ghazal, explores that obsession with the river.  The first in  a series I hope to write about the Flint, it introduces some of the obsessive imagery I've carried with me over the years.  This poem appears in the current Pembroke Magazine.

River Voices

           " ...  say the  past is a muddy

river"

                                       

                                                     -- Evie Shockley

When  she lowers her hands to the river

she feels many dead voices translating river.

Her fingers turn cold, but her lips part,

as if, like a hooked  fish, she longs for the river.

Don’t look down, her mother warned; shifting

the Ford into second gear, crossing the river.

The drawbridge’s rusty spine still rattles

memories she tries to dredge from the river.  

Old men cast their histories into the depths

she can’t reach.  Stories keep shape-shifting over the river.

The trees keep their roots to themselves;

but they let their reflections be stroked by the river. 

When she hears the cricket frogs singing,

she wants to lie down on the banks of the river.

Come night she hears voices.  A drunken brawl.  Somebody

cursing the day he was born.  Somebody trying to drown in the river.

The backwater nags at her.  Dare she strip 

down to the bone and walk barefooted into the river?

POET OF THE DAY: Evie Shockley

I still consider Evie Shockley a North Carolina poet, even though she was born in Tennessee and now teaches at Rutgers. She has strong ties to our state, having taught at Wake Forest University for a number of years and being involved in the Carolina African-American Writers Collective. I came to know her and her work during my stint as Poet Laureate, and she has been one of my favorites ever since.

Evie is the author of four collections of poetry: the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks. Her study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She co-edits the poetry journal jubilat and is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. The following poem is from her new collection, just out from Wesleyan University Press.

my last modernist poem, #4

(or, re-re-birth of a nation)

a clean-cut man brings a brown blackness

to a dream-carved, unprecedented

place. some see in this the end of race,

like the end of a race that begins

with a gun: a finish(ed) line we might

finally limp across. for others,

this miracle marks an end like year’s

end, the kind that whips around again

and again: an end that is chilling,

with a lethal spring coiled in the snow.

___________________________________________

ask lazarus about miracles:

the hard part comes afterwards. he stepped

into the reconstruction of his

life, knowing what would come, but not how.

POET OF THE DAY: Evie Shockley

I still consider Evie Shockley a North Carolina poet, even though she was born in Tennessee and now teaches at Rutgers. She has strong ties to our state, having taught at Wake Forest University for a number of years and being involved in the Carolina African-American Writers Collective. I came to know her and her work during my stint as Poet Laureate, and she has been one of my favorites ever since.

Evie is the author of four collections of poetry: the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks. Her study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She co-edits the poetry journal jubilat and is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. The following poem is from her new collection, just out from Wesleyan University Press.

my last modernist poem, #4

(or, re-re-birth of a nation)

a clean-cut man brings a brown blackness

to a dream-carved, unprecedented

place. some see in this the end of race,

like the end of a race that begins

with a gun: a finish(ed) line we might

finally limp across. for others,

this miracle marks an end like year’s

end, the kind that whips around again

and again: an end that is chilling,

with a lethal spring coiled in the snow.

___________________________________________

ask lazarus about miracles:

the hard part comes afterwards. he stepped

into the reconstruction of his

life, knowing what would come, but not how.