POET'S FEATURE: unsettled by Jodi Barnes

Jodi Barnes recently received second prize in the Poetry Council of North Carolina's Book Award.   Her chapbook Unsettled was published by Main Street Rag. Please visit their website and order a copy!   I've met Jodi only in passing and have stayed in contact through facebook.   I'm delighted to be able to feature some of the poems in her chapbook, as well as a few new ones. First place winner was David Rigsbee, for The Red Tower, and Honorable Mentions were Joseph Bathanti and Nancy Simpson, both of whom I have featured on this site earlier.  You can link to their features to see poems from their outstanding work. 




Jodi Barnes is a poet and writer in Cary, North Carolina. She has a PhD from The University of Georgia and has taught graduate and undergraduate students all facets of human resource management, ethics, leadership and change management at three Research I universities. She has also been a journalist, an HR manager and a consultant.

When she is not writing, Jodi helps teens understand how group identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender) differences and commonalities enrich confidence and competency. She has been a writer-in-residence for Wake County schools for the past two years.

Her favorite author is Tom Robbins and her favorite teachers are her daughters Sarah, Ali and RaeAnna, and her aiding/abetting husband, JB Maddox. Jodi has moved households 24 times--that she can remember.

Denial Lost and Found (from unsettled)

After I lost the 12-week thing

declared inanimate tissue—

removed by gloved hand— 

you mentioned we didn’t

have to have the wedding right away

that first you could move to the coast

that I could come second, find you later

and it was just an idea but I must

have known this was your way

to say let me be unfound.

I tried to forget until our eighth

married year, when you left—

a memory of small, arrested life—

the unviable matter once 

and always between us. 

The ninth year, I revived

what we were not able

to name or bury. 

Holy Magic Goat Shit (from unsettled)

I asked my sixth-grader what she liked about mythology.

She picked Persephone—a damsel lost,

swallowed seeds, a mother's grief,

fascination with hell and frost. 

What do you like? She echoed.

I broke my rule, my language imprecise,

“All of it.” (At least I hadn't lied.)

When she was asleep, I replied:

Hope. The story never has to end 

or remain the same. 

There is holiness in the unfixed. 

Their gods are full of flaws – 

hubris, favorites, fickle laws.

We mortals hold some sway.

They can't resist challenge,

like dads who say, “Go ahead. Take a swing.”

You can get a god's goat – which

eventually shits on you – but it's

god's goat shit, not a pope's.

And wouldn't Yahweh tend toward sheep?

The other thing is magic:

nymphs into cows,

winged horse from mortal blood,

one guy gender-switched, twice!

Can you imagine Jesus asking,

Man or woman: who has more pleasure in sex? 

(But she is eleven; 

that part I’d slice.)

Implacable parent, perfect offspring, 

unshakable ghost in one god

is too much pressure, 

He's too remote.

Souls are never stolen or saved.

Suffering spawns each sacred season. 

And I believe this is true:

The devil only wants his due.

Hera and Zeus, that miserable pair,

can’t keep their distance.

Familiar as family, we know their sins

and those they bore too well – 

Thank whatever god you, my goddess, will. 

The smallest things (from unsettled)

Unless you’re lucky

each box comes furnished

with rattling tears,

a giraffe’s jagged ears 

chipped off your baby’s ceramic arc 

you meant to glue back these 20 years, 

an errant button, two beads of glass,

a photo pass to Frampton’s I’m in You, 

a matchbook from Amsterdam, 

your Sanskrit name in wood,

resolutions made in Birmingham

and a poem you read when your friend 

chose to leave this world. 

All good intentions come to pass 

like things too small to wrap,

too large to be confined to content.

Work Themed Poems  (2)

ON-THE-JOB TRAINING

It used to be good here, Myrna says,

time-and-a-half, double holidays.

It’s my first week, so I nod my head,

hoping to make rent, see my kids again.

Myrna says her kids came from the same

no-good-never-handed-her-a-dime-

didn’t-want-to-see-his-kids—

now he’s in the ground.

And she looks at me like I could be him

so I smile and tell her I just fell hard

on hard-luck times. That I want to

help their mama with bills

but a man can only do so much.

You can’t bleed a turnip, she says

and I agree. Then Myrna turns on me:

But you can dig a hole, throw in the seed.

She rolls her sleeves, grabs two brooms.

I barely have a handle as she sweeps circles around me.

Straight time and toting dirt, she says,

better than waiting for a root to bleed.

-published 2011 by MSR in The Best of Fuquay-Varina Reading Series 

From management professor to bakery salesgirl

At 5:30 a.m. I drive to work, that place 

I manage to burn my fingertips, schlep bread

from rack to rack, stack croissants, sweep

up crumbs of the bourgeoisie. 

If I were still at State, I’d have two more hours

to sleep, teach them what to pay the masses, 

when to sac them, where to outsource brooms,

how to sweep over burnt spirits. 

-published 2011 by MSR in The Best of The Raleigh Reading Series 

POET OF THE DAY: RICHARD KRAWIEC

Richard Krawiec is one of North Carolina's literary treasures--novelist, poet, editor, teacher. He has a lot of laurels upon which he could rest, but the two new poems below, as well as his news about current projects, show that he isn't doing much resting these days.

My first book of free verse poems, Breakdown, was a Finalist for the 2009 Indy Awards for Poetry. My poems and stories appear in some of the top literary mags in the US – Sou’wester, many mountains moving, Shenandoah, Witness, Cream City Review, etc. I've also published 2 novels, a story collection, and 4 plays. I've been fortunate to have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NC Arts Council, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. I teach online Fiction Writing for UNC Chapel Hill, and won their Excellence in Teaching Award for 2009.

My new projects include -

My play,Cluck Variations, a comedy about an African American woman from Chicago and a white Southern suburbanite who meet at a park and learn to overcome the walls of ethnicity and culture to connect as women, was recently staged in a reading as part of the Playground A Theatre Co-operative presentation in Durham.

Starting in April I will be writing a column, Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off, for haijinx, an online magazine. I will be focusing on critiquing haiku as poems first, showing where they meet the standard of poetry, and where they fail to rise about exercises in form.

Neighbors

before my neighbor’s ranch house

two police cruisers grumble

in Park one officer stands

on wet asphalt leaning

into the rear car’s open window

my neighbor’s father, mother

pace the edge of the driveway

shaking gray-haired heads

mouths cut into deep clay

furrows of sorrow

my neighbor’s wife

slouches beside her side door

arms folded across her chest

her body trembles head ticks

in a slow disbelieving arc

heated argument

the standing officer calls

over his shoulder without looking

anywhere until a sudden abrupt

angry squawking erupts

on my front lawn

beak to beak two mocking

birds rise an upright flutter-

fight wings beating the air

before the quiet circle of impatiens

Unemployment

a row of cold houses

light so sad and yellow

it fails to extend

past the whining window panes

even the small corners

of these front stoops

huddle in darkness

somewhere a dog barks

certainly a lover must moan

blue screens flare

a drainage ditch glows

on some corner

yesterday’s debris

sparkles in the effluvial night

softly I breathe

my own breath fog

inhale the thousand effervescent

suns in the bluing sky

POET OF THE DAY: AL MAGINNES

Al Maginnes writes some of the most tender, heart-wrenching poems around. He has a new chapbook, Between States, coming out soon, so see below to find out about the pre-publication offer from Main Street Rag. His chapbook was recommended by Richard Krawiec, who will be Poet of the Day on tomorrow's post.

This Limited Edition chapbook is part of Main Street Rag's Author's Choice Chapbook Series. Print run is based entirely on advance sales. Advance Sale Discount price of $3.50 (+ shipping) will be available until May 4. Release/ship date will be May 11.

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Author Bio

Al Maginnes is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Ghost Alphabet (White Pine Press 2008) which won the 2007 White Pine Poetry Prize, Dry Glass Blues (Pudding House Press 2007), a single long poem published as a chapbook, and Film History (Word Tech Editions 2005). A former recipient of a fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council, his poems appear widely. He lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina and teaches composition, literature and creative writing at Wake Technical Community College.

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Recommending Author's Comment

"Dream what has always been dreamed,/ and nothing changes," begins one of the poems in Between States. The people in these poems are looking for new dreams and new ways of dreaming. Many of the individuals begin at a place of uncertainty, but refuse to stay there. Over and over, these poems insist that we are not defined by our physical circumstances but by our reaction to those circumstances, what we do, what we say. These poems show how "the need to be heard does not change." Al Maginnes does not offer easy answers; he understands that we are "puzzled by/ a past we were too quickly part of." But he does offer the possibility for hope. He recognizes the "invisible music" that binds us, the possibility of "song that flies over/ empty plains of prayer and absence" to let us sing our purest human music.

Richard Krawiec,
author of Breakdown, A Father's Journey
(Finalist 2009 Indie Awards for Poetry)

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Between States

When the plane's cabin filled
with the sound of crying, I blamed
the children a few rows forward.
Below us, the landscape
of one anonymous state unfolded
into another. Would it surprise you
to learn the one crying was a woman?
The volume of her grief would not
yield to the whispered comforting
of the attendants. Beside me,
a man, suit rumpled from
too many flights, grunted in sleep
he held as grimly as a child might
hold the ragged blanket that has been
her most reliable companion.
My daughter cried for the three-
and-a-half hours of her first flight,
her ear, already infected, burning
with altitude, the song I sang
to soothe her as unwelcome
as the plane's pressurized air.
Maybe the woman wept for illness,
her own or someone else's,
or some betrayal of love because
we are mostly easily broken
by what is near, our body
or the body we bring close.
The body of the daughter
I bathe and pray over
will become foreign to me,
a journey as inevitable
as the failure of my body
or the words I whispered
to quiet her or the tears
of a stranger as we were all
borne from one state to another.

Maureen Alsop (A Poem for the Summer Solstice)

I met Maureen through coldfront.com, the online review that dissed my last book. She had seen my "award" for the best response to a review and contacted me. Her latest book had also been dissed--by the same reviewer. She emailed me for some advice on dealing with bad reviews, or in her case, one bad review that overshadowed all the other good ones she had received. Why is life like that? One bad notice gnaws at us, no matter the other terrific things people have said about our writing, our teaching, our this and our that. Maureen lives in California and is poetry editor for the online poetry magazine Poemeleon.

I asked Maureen to send me some poems from her most recent book, Apparition Wren, published by Main Street Rag in Charlotte. This one seems suited to the sensuousness of early summer, when the earth opens herself to our trowels and our dreams.


Ascension

The body is a house I lived in once; for a time
I spoke to the wind. Radiance and dust blew
through me. I wore my dead

husband’s bathrobe, but he was dead only
in dreams. We, the only lovers

born to the deep lanes of dark,
unmapped our palms. Our hands,
pressed together, led always
between my legs.

In my closed field,

if you come too far, if you come
too far, you’ll feel the earth swagger,
constellations disperse, my succulent
loam soften open.




Maureen is the author of two collections of poetry: The Diction of Moths, (forthcoming from Ghost Road Press) and Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag, 2007). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals, including Tampa Review, New Delta Review, and Typo.

Penelope Scambly Schott

(Penelope Scambly Schott)

❉ I met Penelope Schott in the summer of 1977 at a writers' workshop in Critz, VA, where A.R. Ammons was the workshop leader. We have been friends ever since. Penelope then lived in New Jersey; she now lives in Portland, Oregon. She's an avid hiker, as the photo suggests. Penelope's earlier books include The Pest Maiden, A Is For Anne, and Baiting the Void. May the Generations Die in the Right Order may be ordered from Main Street Rag Books. (mainstreetrag.com)


❉ What’s Inside



When I opened the box
and took out the bag

when I unfolded the top of the bag
and reached in past my wrist

when I unfurled my fingers
and poked toward the bottom of the bag

when I stroked something
that almost felt like fur

it was my dead father’s springy white hair
it was my yellow dog’s silky coat

it was the channeled mink coat of the lady
who used to live downstairs

it was the silk-lined ermine muff
from when I was a princess

it was the damp taste of my yellow pigtail
wound around a puffy red thumb

it was one howl in a chorus
on this treeless hill

it was the tufted and variegated pelt
I am sprouting in my sleep



❉ What the Bed Knows



I am a bed in a busy house of loss,
frost in the yard and inside the house.

Today I am married to the lamp shade:
we cast our hot eye on the damp head

of a solitary woman dreaming of lions,
whiskers purring, fur on the quilt, not

this wide, cold sheet. No silence
ever wider than death, no absence

more complete. The languor of grief
astounds her. Her fingers are weak,

and she holds sadness like a handful
of loose gravel,

not knowing how to set it down.