POET OF THE DAY: Linda Parsons Marion

Linda Parsons Marion has been a friend for many years, though I see her rarely. Her new book titled BOUND has just been published by Wind Publications, Charlie Hughes's fine press in Kentucky. Linda's poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Cornbread Nation 2, Negative Capability, Nimrod, Potomac Review, CALYX, Helicon Nine, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, among others. Her work was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and she has received two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, among other awards. Essays and poems have also appeared in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine Editions, 2007), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia(University Press of Kentucky, 2003), Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (University of Tennessee Press, 2002), Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia. She lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.

(Cover art by Suzanne Stryk)

Birthmark

High on her luscious thigh, we point
to the map of our corner of the universe.
Faint and violet, a nebula yet unprobed
by the world’s curiosities, we are drawn
to its small burst, star rising in the east.
We’d lasso it to earth if we could, fall
prostrate in awe, shouting glory, revolve
elliptical around the blue-hot core, let brilliance
shoot from our fingertips. Now she crawls
out of reach, xylophone and spinning top
her planets to conquer with flags of grasp
and drool. When her legs lengthen, taper
to womanhood, will this constellation fade,
our worship unmarked, will our wanting hearts
look up and remember this brief heaven?

Sprout

The gardener I never reckoned on, she sows
with the fire of a zealot—rows cowlicked
in garlic, snow peas fence-latticed, mounds
studded gold—my daughter bends to earth’s
pure bidding. She’s living up to her baby name,
called Tater for the sun-brown quickness on nose
and arms. She means to mine these coffers
for yields unborn, sequin the counter with
a gracious plenty. Her reach is the surest we know,
to feed and be sated, even as she nurses
a sprout on her belly’s milk, all of us waiting
for the fruit made flesh, for the muskmelon
to twirl its sweet mouth in pearlized clay
yearning toward first harvest.

POET OF THE DAY: Valerie Nieman

Valerie Nieman is a poet, novelist, short story writer, travel writer, literary magazine editor, and teacher. Her third novel, Blood Clay, is being published by Press 53. Set in rural North Carolina, it focuses on our crucial need for community and the cost exacted for truth-telling. Her 2000 novel Survivors took readers into the hard lives and hard times of a West Virginia factory town in the early 1970s. Fred Chappell said, “Survivors is a jolt to the system…. Valerie Nieman pulls no punches. What she calls ‘unleashed reality’ roars through every sentence. Unforgettable.” Her first novel, Neena Gathering, was a science fiction tale set in the Appalachians. Fidelities, her collection of short fiction, features stories set in rural areas from the Alleghenies to the Carolina Piedmont, most of them published in journals such as The Kenyon Review and Arts & Letters, and in anthologies such as Degrees of Elevation and Racing Home: New Stories by Award-Winning North Carolina Authors. Her poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake, was published in 2006. Her work has been selected in two national chapbook competitions and appeared in such journals as Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, Blackbird, New Letters, REDiViDER, and the Southern Poetry Review, as well as numerous anthologies, most recently After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events and Southern Appalachian Poetry: An Anthology of Works by 37 Poets.

Two April poems from Wake Wake Wake

First Generation

(First published in Tar River Poetry)

You spade the kitchen garden

each spring, turning the fine,

dark dirt loose from the years.

Gladiolas you planted for your dead wife

sprout again, sharpened green,

opening smaller and smaller

yellow faces that wag red tongues.

You mutter peasant German

going backward in the row,

planting potatoes

under a dark moon,

planting peas, planting cabbage

by the signs.

Does the seed know

those stick-shaped words

you never taught me?

At night you walk the rooms

of an unwarmed house,

your steps too short

for a man as tall as you have been.

You write letters in pencil

on blue-lined paper, careful English

dancing in German shoes.

The table where you work is ring-marked:

for years it held plants on saucers, cuttings.

When she died, these died also.

After a time, you stacked the pots

in the cellar.

You write me letters

telling of the cold, of summers

that are shorter and shorter,

and I am south, feeling the sun

earlier and later,

feeling here that I have failed my blood.

Your eyes have become paler blue,

and I would want to say

the color of March sky,

thin lines on paper,

or lilac petals, faded.

They measure out

this distance between us,

the rivers and the days,

and mark out the unseasonable shadows

that sharpen along the road home.

Hanging Up Clothes

(First published in The Greenfield Review)

Out in the last fine rain,

the light red in the west,

after the storm.

A delight for the eye

and tomorrow.

A deer comes from the wood line

and stands deep in daisies,

watching.

My white-flag work

does not frighten her.

The red light glows

in her summer coat.

The light is red.

The deer grazes.

I move from line to line.

THE GIFT OF POETRY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Nancy Simpson's "Living Above the Frost Line"

December first and time to begin to think seriously about holiday gift-giving! Over the next two weeks I will be making recommendations for poetry lovers--and for those who think they don't like poetry but will change their minds once they read these books.

I will begin with my longtime friend and sister in the art, Nancy Simpson, whose Living Above the Frost Line: New and Selected Poems was published this fall by Carolina Wren Press. It's a beautiful, elegant book, with French flaps (a shawl-like dust jacket/cover) and cover image that is gorgeous. Just click on the image above to enlarge and see what I mean.

What's inside is even more beautiful, the better part of a poet's lifetime of work, illuminating in its passion for place and, yes, peace in the midst of so much ongoing war. I have known Nancy's work for over 3 decades, and my regard for her work shows, I hope, in the introduction I wrote for this book, a portion of which follows.

Nancy Simpson has enriched the literary community of North Carolina for over thirty years. Her work was first heralded by the late Richard Hugo when he read and celebrated her poems at the Callanwolde Literary Festival in Atlanta, shortly after she began to show her poetry around to friends and readers in the far reaches of western North Carolina. He praised her rich inner life and her ability to give expression to it as it manifested itself in her everyday life. Whether driving over the Nantahala Gorge in “Night Student,” expressing the complexity of self in “Driven into the interior,” or documenting the carnage of the first Gulf War in “Voices from the Fringe,” she brings the inner and outer worlds of her experience into a harmony that resonates like the current giving voice and shape to the mountain creeks she loves. Living Above the Frost Line: Selected and New Poems traces the growth of a poet determined to survive despite the obstacles raised by age, mortality, and the inevitable losses that come from being alive in this world. Through her poetry she greets that half-drowned woman, harking from her Florida girlhood, who appears as her muse in “Bridge On the River Kwai, “ bearing gifts of memory and sustaining images. In return the poet gives her “a mountain, the safest place to be.” Rarely has the relationship between poet and muse been so beautifully expressed.

Nancy, on the porch of her Cherry Mountain home.

I'm delighted to be able to offer several of my favorite poems.

Tanfastic

At 12:17 this Sunday

he is uninhibited

in front of God and

everybody traveling

I-75 South, a man

lounging in the bed

of his red pickup truck.

He is getting his tan

the fast way, 80 mph

stretched out

on his chaise lounge,

his black bikini

drawing the sun down.

He is holding a blue

tumbler in his hand.

I can only guess

what he is drinking.

I want to make a pass,

I mean, get past him

in this god-awful traffic.

I want to see

the face of the woman

at the steering wheel

who is taking him for a ride.

The Gleaners

In the last days of the age

word went out that women

therefore must be allowed

to participate in creation.

And there came forth an artist

calling to us, Come hither!

In the center of a cornfield

in Brasstown Valley,

she sculpted an assembly

of corn women. She fashioned

husk bodies, worked six days

making in her image. She dressed

the corn women in gauze gowns

and entwined eglantine in their

cornsilk hair. Come hither!

We entered the cornfield,

our capes waving

in the evening breeze. We

circled the corn women,

lit a circle of small fires

and danced in firelight.

In the morning we came forth

to sculpt, to paint, and to write

the story that is left to tell.

Looking For the Sons of My House

I am looking for the sons of my house,

grown from babies into boys,

three of them with dark brown eyes.

Where are they now? The one

who brought a snake down the hall

into my room. The one who

had to fall off the porch, to test every rule?

The young one who flew half-way

around the world to be my son?

Their bikes are wrecked, tossed

in the landfill with their outgrown shoes.

One day I saw they were no longer boys but men,

the one who drove me to night class in Asheville

when he was a teen, the same one

I stood with as mother of the groom.

Where are they now?

One whistles on a hillside, feeds his dogs.

One is stuck in rush-hour traffic, stuck

in a marriage I blessed. The young one

climbs today on a mountain in Switzerland.

All of them far from the mother house.

Skin Underwater

1.

From the top of the mountain we see

Town Valley submerged in clouds.

You say the word ‘ocean’ and a gull

flies from the branch of an oak,

squawks his squawk.

I know a lie when I see one.

Seagulls do not live in the mountains.

It is the woodpecker men call extinct,

alive, soaring above oaktops.

Now driving through fog in the valley

you show me things not seen before.

Men are swimming on the courthouse lawn.

Women stare fish-eyed from their gardens,

their mouths turned up.

2.

Barnacles collect on the pier.

Count one for every life you were young:

the schoolgirl, mute,

who spoke only underwater

hoping no one could decipher.

In water memories converge.

Shell is sharp to touch.

Seaweed is soft as hair, and skin

is the large sensor. Skin

keeps its own record of the day

you slit your forearm, diving

into green ocean at South Beach.

Look how barnacles bashed by waves

hold on. Some are encased in stone.

They could cut you bloody, Girl.

3.

Looking back I see my mother

was misinformed, promised an abortion

though it was illegal, five doctors

dead sure I was damaged, and certain

she would die if she gave birth.

She did sort of die, seeing me hideous

in her dream, seeing a ball of hair

bouncing in the room, in the afternoon

when she tried to rest.

I heard from her lips

how she fell down praying.

My mother was devout. I knew

she could not kill. Don’t you see?

I was in the best possible position.

A voice from a dream

Sleep again.

Dream yourself

on the north bank of the river

inconspicuous as deadwood.

Drift ashore

where grass glows at sunrise,

where light is found all day.

Dream a new body.

a blue robe, and you

walking home.

We stand over the carcass of a jellyfish.

It has given up the ghost, grown opaque.

Moon Jelly, I say, we knew you when

you lit the sky of the underworld.

And we count out loud the lines on its body

as if in counting we might learn

how long it lived in the ocean.

Gulls show interest in our arithmetic.

They circle. They fly down

to the sound of our voices.

Are we going to reach the end

of the island? Are we moving in a circle?

Light-headed we walk.

6.

It interests me seeing

the hermit scuttle away

with a moon shell for a new house.

Look how furrows of silt create

a frontal lobe. We are walking,

don’t you think, on gray matter?

I will always say yes

to almost everything you ask. Yes,

it is possible to imagine

intelligence beneath our feet.

7.

Evening turns out just as imagined.

We walk the length of the beach

and lie on the sand. We enter

the surf, our bodies submerging.

In hearing distance of a wave’s yes,

earth is a woman with plans.

What She Saw and What She Heard

On the mountain a woman saw

the road bank caved in

from winter’s freeze-thaw

and April rain erosion.

Trees leaned over the road the way

strands of hair hung on her forehead.

She gaped, her face as tortured

as the face she saw engraved in dirt.

Roots growing sideways shaped brows,

two eyes. Humus washed

down the bank like a nose.

Lower down, where a rock

was shoved out by weathering,

a hole formed the shape of a mouth.

The woman groaned, Agh!

Her spirit toppled

to the ground, slithered

under the roots of an oak.

She stood there asking

What? Who?

Back to reason, back home

she finished her questions:

What can one make of the vision, that face

on the north side of the mountain?

Reckoning comes, a thought:

It is not the image of a witch nor a god,

but Earth’s face, mouth open saying,

Save me.

TIMBERLINE: Poem

TIMBERLINE

Looking up at the ruins of them,

ragged edges those dead trees

raise against the sky, and beyond

them the cut of a hawk’s wing,

the curve of the river

of cloud shapes, I’m likely to squander

this morning with dreaming them

turned back to women again, having grown

old along with these mountains

and left here to die like the rest of us.

I’d sit for hours and watch,

if I could, how the wind through their branches

keeps trying to make them sway,

supple as girls again, line-dancing

over the rocky horizon of Snowbird.

But not much of morning’s left.

I should be piecing a new quilt or mending

my husband’s socks. I should be stirring

the beans left to scorch in the pot.

What does wind whisper

up there of death? Or is dancing

the gist of it? As for my need to bear witness

to all I cannot keep from dying,

the truth is I’ve never liked loose ends.

Just look at my quilts: a succession

of rings, wreaths, and whirligigs.

Threaded since daybreak,

my needle waits here on the table

as if to remind me how stitches too small

to be known save by touch

of the thread toiling under my fingers

can fashion a way out of one death and into

another. So stand up, I tell myself.

Shake out your stiff limbs and sway

like your sisters up there on the ridge,

still in line for the next dancing lesson.

from BLACK SHAWL, LSU Press, 1992

ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE--FEATURING ROSEMARY ROYSTON

After taking a break for a few weeks from my blog, I'm back with big news. ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE: STORIES, ESSAYS, AND POEMS BY WRITERS LIVING IN AND INSPIRED BY THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS has arrived. For the next several posts I will be featuring the work of some of the contributors. This book will sell like hotcakes, so click on the link just above to go to the Netwest blog to order a copy.

My first author is Rosemary Royston, a young poet who just gets better and better. She lives in northeast Georgia. Her poetry has been published in The Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, and is forthcoming in Literal Latte and online at Dark Sky Magazine and Public Republic. She is the recipient of the 2010 Literal Latte Food Verse Award, and in 2004 she placed first and third in poetry, Porter Fleming Literary Contest. Rosemary has taught poetry courses at the Institute for Continuing Learning at Young Harris College, and she holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University.

I especially love Rosemary's Dogwood Winter, the last of the three. It's a poem I wish I'd written! But I wouldn't mind claiming the other two, either.

Neighbor Lady

She has made them beds.
Beds of hay sporadically placed
in the ragged green pasture.
Pallets, really. Some say

she once lived north of here
had a high falutin’, high payin’ job.
Now she wears yellow rubber gloves,
like the ones I wear to clean the bathroom,

and there’s a turban of sorts on her head.
They say she’s the richest lady in the county.
Sometimes on a soft summer’s night
I see her truck on the property line

and in the air I can feel her presence
as she soothes those she loves so much.
She has spoken to me once: One cow
is worth ten good neighbors.

The Possibility of Snow

Ms. Callie is like a perfumed sparrow,
tiny and fragile in dress slacks,
the seam straight and pressed,
her sweater a matching shade of green.

When I hug her hello I’m afraid she will topple
under the weight of my slender arms.
At 80 her hair is coiffed and teased
and she’s just short of five feet,

only a head taller than my son, Luke.
We are visiting Angie, her daughter, (my friend)
and after talking and laughing over Oolong tea
we realize that my 7-year old has vanished—

he’s not in the guest room with the TV,
nor is he chasing the many cats around the house.
His drawing pad lies abandoned on the floor.
In the distance we hear a soft song of sorts

and are drawn to it, only to find him
on Ms. Callie’s bed, stretched out,
his head propped against the footboard,
conversing with her on the possibility of snow.

Dogwood Winter

Ants raid the bath, wasps claim the washroom,
even as the cool of winter looms.

The forsythia sings against a chorus
of green, yet the hue of winter looms.

The bunting’s a blur of vibrant blue,
off-setting winter’s gray loom.

Calves nurse in the open field, chilled
as the nip of winter looms.

Blood buds of azaleas burst forth
even though winter looms.

The creek hums a rain-filled song,
oblivious to the winter that looms.

Rosemary, thyme, and sage grow
in the sunroom, even as winter looms.

ALMA: Poems and Drawings

(copyright by Sharyn Jane Hyatt)


Many years ago I self-published with artist Sharyn Jane Hyatt a collection of poems and drawings titled Alma. Those poems were later gathered into my Wildwood Flower, published by LSU Press in 1992. Sherry's drawings could not be included, alas, and I still think about doing another limited edition run of this manuscript.

I thought you might enjoy seeing some of her drawings, so for the next day or two, I will be posting one of them, along with one of the poems.

Southern Appalachian Poetry

This is how Rob Neufeld's review of the recently published Southern Appalachian Poetry anthology begins in the Asheville Citizen Times today:

M any of the poets in "Southern Appalachian Poetry," Marita Garin's new anthology, talk like ghosts. Their laments and longings view life as if from under a TVA lake. This is mostly by design; for Garin, poet and Elderhostel instructor, set out to "document and preserve details of a way of life in the Southern Appalachian region that is beginning to disappear."

Marita, herself a splendid poet, explains in her introduction that this book was begun well over a decade ago. Its original title was FROM BLOODROOT TO SUMMIT, a wonderful turn of phrase and imagery. I wish she could have kept it, and I wish now that I had stolen it for one of my own books! The poems of mine in the anthology are from my second collection, Wildwood Flower. I've moved on since then, but I don't really think of the voice of Alma as sounding like a ghost's voice. The reason her voice stirred me when I began to hear it in my head is that it sounded in the here and now and made my own contemporary activities, whether looking out my window at the leaves falling or pulling up the okra in a frost-stricken garden, come alive in a way that plumbed the roots of where I was and still am. These poems do not view life as if from under a TVA lake. They view life as an ongoing dialogue, a conversation, between present and past. And they also reach into the future, if only by insinuation. But that's the subject of another post.

Let Rob know how you feel about this after reading his review at citizen-times.com. He's eager for response both to his columns and on The Read on WNC. (thereadonwnc.ning.com) He would like more reader responses to the issues he raises on this combination of blog, message board, and author website. And by all means, go to your local bookstore and purchase this book. You will be glad you did.


(Louisiana State University Press, 1992)