WHEN I STOPPED WANTING TO BE EMMYLOU HARRIS

Here's a recent blog post on South85journal.com,  a literary site well worth visiting.    I'm using this post to begin some commentary on my workshop at "The Gathering" in Winston-Salem, NC, back at the beginning of April.  This popular literary event, sponsored and presented by Jacar Press (whose founder Richard Krawiec, is a man of many talents) in Durham, NC, has become one of North Carolina's most welcoming and enjoyable literary events.  The title of my class was The Legato Line, and its presumed focus was the music of the poetic line and how one can weave a poem together in ways that approach the art of singing.  Each participant had an individual approach to structuring a poem, so in the posts to follow I hope to touch on a few of those poems, featuring lines that made my ear take heed and listen.    

           

      Why not submit some of your own work?  Or just enjoy the various offerings here, especially the blogs.   Here's the link.     http://south85journal.com/blog/

When I Stopped Wanting to Be Emmylou Harris

on APR 22, 16in BLOG, FEATURED BLOG POSTby SOUTH 85 JOURNALwith NO COMMENTS

Kathryn Stripling Byer

It took me a while.  After all, who wouldn’t want to wear fancy boots, lots of fringe, and sing, not to mention write, songs like “From Boulder to Birmingham”? Even now I marvel at how long it took me to realize that the poetry I was writing was my way of singing.  After years of Emmylou envy, I began to hear my voice, as I gave readings, approach song.  I began to focus on poetry as sound, as what Richard Wagner came to call even years before he’d inscribed the first note of an opera, “sound landscapes.”  Of course this poetic landscape encompasses all the elements of poetry, syntax, image, lineation and so forth, but more and more I began to listen, really listen to where the language was leading me.

This listening can take its own sweet time, and waiting is, as far as I’m concerned, a key component of good writing.  Several years ago, while visiting a good friend in Oregon, I joined her and a few of her poet-friends for a workshop. As a prompt, she offered up a poem with a train in it.  I can’t recall much of the poem, but the sound of that train pulled me into the first line of a poem that took me a long time to sing to its closing notes.  “So long, so long, the train sang,” I wrote in my notebook. And so began the first notes that kept calling and calling to me, haunting me, even down to the final days of my father’s life, as I lay in my childhood bed, trying to weave this poem together, finally.  I was, as I now realize, “listening” this poem to completion.

“Legato,” that is what I was trying to achieve–the legato line.  Singers know it well, and so indeed do poets, though they may not know it…..yet.  The opposite of legato is staccato, and I knew the sound landscape for this poem was not at all staccato.  This poem’s legato line was a moaning, all the way down through the flatlands, sounding like Georgia blues singer Precious Bryant singing, “I’m goin’ home on the morning train. That evening train may be too late, so I’m goin’ home on the morning train.”

I was going home, too. I’d been going home since that first line jotted down quickly so many years ago in Portland, Oregon.  “So long, so long, the train sang/ deep in the piney woods, well out of sight…. As sound only, it found me…long vowel reaching for nobody I knew as yet,

sounding an emptiness

deeper than I thought  could blow through

the cracks of this song where I’m kindling a fire

for my fingers to reach toward,

a kindling that transforms whatever it touches

to pure sound, a pearl, say,

that’s cupped in my palm

like a kernel my teeth cannot crack,

the pulse of it strung note by note round my neck,

that old rhythm and blues beat

I can’t stop from singing me home

on this slow morning train

of a poem, its voice calling

downwind, What took you so long?

This morning train of a poem became the first poem in my most recent book,Descent.  And its question still haunts me.  What took me so long to give up Emmylou and let go into my own legato line?  My own lifeline bearing me home again?  Maybe it’s the same journey we take over and over again with each new poem we write.

Precious Bryant.   More about her on a later post. 

Kathryn Stripling Byer, a native of Southwest Georgia,  lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Her poetry, prose, and fiction have appeared widely, including  Hudson Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, and Shenandoah.   Her first book of poetry, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was published in the AWP Award Series, followed by the Lamont (now Laughlin) prize-winning Wildwood Flower, from LSU Press.  Her subsequent collections have been published in the LSU Press Poetry Series. She served for five years as North Carolina’s first woman poet laureate.

Photo credit:  By Yogibones from (Flickr) [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

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. 

Southern Poetry Review: Julie Suk

The Southern Poetry Review has introduced readers to some of the best poets in the country, many of them from the South.   As promised, here is Julie Suk's splendid poem from the Winter issue.  Julie has a new book out from Autumn House Press, Lie Down With Me: New and Selected Poems.   She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.


SPR has just published a gathering of poems published in the magazine over the last ten years.  More about that in a later post.

BRUEGHEL IN THE HYDRANGEAS

Aging through August, the hydrangeas 

turn from pastels to brick and bronze,

the same rich colors tempering

Brueghel’s Triumph of Death,

that ravaging depiction of pillage and war—

the myriad mutilations 

we foolishly thought we would modify.

When we die, will our last glimpse be

of brilliance, a smear of color scumbled 

over the sour realities left behind?

I wish, but then I look with envy

at two lovers in the painting 

having at it under a tree, 

the pair of them entwined,

her head thrown back, the creamy neck 

exposed as long as paint holds.

Better than years of scrubbing 

the resilience of dirt,

cheeks graying along the way.

True, Brueghel’s faces are never 

Valentine sweet—

you can depend on a darkness there

brooding below the pink.

Southern Fictions: Coda

After I'd completed my "Southern Fictions" sonnet sequence back in the late 90's, I wrote what I considered a coda.   It grew out of the memory of my grandmother telling me when, as a young girl, I asked her whether I was Democrat or Republican.  I think we might  have been watching the t.v. they had just bought, and a news program was on.  I knew nothing of the two parties then.   By now I know too much.  And after watching the SC Republican primary's race-baiting and seeing how successful it was, I know that little has changed.  I never attached this coda to the sonnets, but after Gingrich's win, thanks, let's face it, to his race-baiting, I feel like sharing it.   This is the first time I've shown it to anyone but my husband.

Democrat or Republican, 

I asked in childhood, can 

you tell me which I  am ?  

A Democrat, she slammed

the word down hard.  And don’t

you ever dare forget it. 

And I haven’t.  I regret to mention

 that the most of my relations

have.  Blame civil rights.

Afraid to do the right

thing, they turned right

and lost the moral high

ground.  Elected bigots

and  were proud of it.

CONTINUING TO EXCAVATE OUR SOUTHERN PAST

On Martin Luther King day, I remember a poem I began on a drive several years ago from Selma to Montgomery.  It first appeared in Crab Orchard Review's special issue on Southern writing.

How do we keep the memory of those times alive?   Maybe by re-examining and excavating our own memories and sharing them?  Even though they may be powder-kegs, frighteningly explosive if we come too close to them.

This poem will be in my new collection, Descent, due from LSU Press in early fall of 2012.  

What I See Now

I see yucca and winter stubble along

their route, now and then markers 

noting the sites where they camped,

singing hymns, keeping watch as the Ancient

Ones do in the Bibles they carried.

I take note of hay bales like those 

I grew up seeing everywhere,

Billy’s Tire Center crumbling to nothing

beside a small graveyard with plastic blooms

bled now to white from the weather.

Montgomery waits straight ahead,

looking these days  like everywhere else.

Wal-Mart.  Home Depot. 

Driving through downtown,

we tick off the fast-food chains.

Why not MacDonald’s?  We order

our coffee to go.  Senior

discount.  The girl at the register

rings it up, looking no older than

seventeen, her story holding

not much left of what happened

here

forty years ago.

Blue eyes,

I notice.  Stark

purple eye shadow. 

*

My best friend at Finishing School,

as we  called it while lifting

our lily-white pinkies

and pursing our lips for effect,

came from Selma, 

a beauty queen born late

to parents who asked that their only child

not room with anyone whose shade

of iris bloomed darker than blue.   

Smoking cigarettes, bold in the parking lot,

we watched a regiment of frat men

in Rebel duds raising  the Bonnie Blue Flag

while their girlfriends stood swaying

in hoop skirts: a squadron of cheerleaders

urging them onward, their brave drunks, 

defenders of white Southern womanhood.

Meanwhile her mother was driving

across the state line with a black woman

kept in the back seat to mind

many layers of pink lace and satin,

arriving in time for the ball-gown

to be lifted out  and ironed ever so carefully 

down in the basement where 

those not invited to Mayday

Ball, rapt as an ashram

of wannabe’s, inhaled

our Salem's right down

to the filter and exhaled

our smoke rings,

observing them hang 

in the singed air like ghosts 

before fading away. 

*

Spanish moss hung, 

my friend later told me,

from phony live oaks round the dance floor

while black waiters served phony champagne

(no alcohol  within a 50 mile radius lest

we  be banished, forevermore losing

our chance to be “finished”

like fine crystal ready to be rung

by just the right finger.).

My friend’s gown came back

splashed with whiskey, a stain 

that could never be washed from its pink

satin bodice. My friend did not come back

the next year.  She transferred to Birmingham

Southern.  I wonder what she saw

with those bonnie eyes when the 16th Street

Baptist Church blew, and the little girls pulled

from the rubble lay finished

beyond comprehension, 

their role in this story I see now

as being a stubble field 

close to the edge

of an altered state

line I’m still

trying to cross

with an old

roadmap wrinkled

as yesterday’s

pink satin

inside my skull.

                                       

WILLIE JAMES KING

Willie James King

I became an admirer of Willie James King a few years ago while I was still NC Poet Laureate.  Preparing a feature for the NC Arts Council on Pembroke Magazine's African American writers  issue, I knew that  I liked his poetry right away.  Since then I've come to like  him, his straightforward presentation of his life and his work, his obvious delight in the written word, and his sense of place and region.    Reared in Orrville, Alabama,  he is the author of three books of which only one is still in print, The House in the Heart.  (Such a great title, isn't it?)  It has a foreword by Cathy Smith-Bowers, our current NC Poet Laureate.  His poems appear widely in literary print journals and online as well, among them Alehouse, Appalachian Heritage,  Confrontation, Cutthroat, The Caribbean Writer, Pembroke Magazine, Obsidian, The Lullwater Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. ( Over a hundred-plus poems, or so.  Wow!) He resides in Montgomery, AL. His manuscript, Autumn's Only Blood is scheduled for publication in 2012.

I will be posting more about this book when it appears, but for now my readers will have to be satisfied with the following three poems from the collection and this testimonial that I wrote after reading Willie James's manuscript.




How a poet comes to his voice remains a mystery and so it should remain, for poetic lyricism and passion rise up in the darkest of times, as well as in the most beautiful. It sings those moments when the words in one's mouth taste of blood, as well as those when they taste of ripe plum, sweet, sweet, sweet, as Willie James King reminds us, closing out his powerful new book of poems. Dedicated to Troy Davis, executed by my native state of Georgia after denying an appeal that might have exonerated him, these poems speak honestly of the injustice inflicted by racism, the strength of resistance, and the sheer pleasure, inextricable from the pain, that being alive can bring, and doing so with what I call pure, unadulterated "wordlove." This poet has learned to trust his language, let it lead him where the poem needs to go. His poems sing, mourn, rage, celebrate, their language always remaining true to its source. 








It Will Not Slip

To pull away from it all, you know, quit!

without an effort to begin again

is as if you've done enough now to sit,

look, as if there’s so little left to gain.

You are allowed to feel the way you feel.

It’s a given; most journeys do get rough

as oil-slick hands trying to hold a wet eel,

whose struggle makes the slightest grasp too tough.

You just don’t give it only half your heart,

in doing so, expect to reach your goal.

Know that giving up is the hardest part

(a bud must strain before its flower shows).

Take a handful of grit to gird your grip;

then, let the eel struggle! it will not slip.

That Fear

Ah, winter blew-in hard, with it came snow,

and those who said they wanted it grew tired

too soon, in just a few drab days or so.

On T.V., a white world seems gentrified

but none of us had seen snow this far south;

and most would rather not since those who tried

found out how hard it is to get about.

Some want it if it would remain soft-ice,

think it might be better and fun no doubt.

But ice outside, in any form’s not nice

to me. Drivers just don’t know how to steer.

Taking on roads here is mere sacrifice.

Once out there one feels like a lane-locked deer

craving the safety of the woods, that fear.

It's True

More than once, I dreamt the world was on-fire

A blond, thick blaze sloping down the mountain,

unstoppable in its famished desire,

weaving a dark, monochromatic plain,

pitch darkness that contradicted its flame,

moving like lava-milk 'cross the landscape.

Waves from another planet was to blame.

And so it seemed there would be no escape.

Spew and soot like snow was all about us,

sedulous mainly, making good its threat;

but soon it dawned, I was dreaming; and thus

I woke in fits, starts, and all wet with sweat.

If you think something is out to get you,

don’t be surprised only to find it's true.

My thanks to Willie James for letting me showcase these poems on my blog!

POET OF THE DAY: Robert West

"It's remarkable how often the national poetry establishment fails to celebrate the many fine southern poets writing today. Our poets win an oddly small number of major literary awards, and they appear in far too few anthologies of national scope. " How could I not be partial to a poet who at the beginning of a review in a major Southern literary journal states precisely what I've been thinking? I've known Robert West since the days when he was editor The Carolina Quarterly at UNC-CH, where he received his PhD. He now teaches at Mississippi State University, though I'm hoping he will return eventually to his native state one of these days.

He's one of the sharpest critics around, and to add to his luster, he is a native of the western NC mountains. As if he needed any more luster, I'll polish off his biography by saying that he's also a poet, a widely published one-- the author of two poetry chapbooks: Best Company (2005) and Out of Hand (2007)--with a third due soon from Finishing Line Press. The poems below are from that forthcoming collection.

The Owl

after Apollinaire

My heart’s an owl nailed down, then freed,

then nailed again. Too spent to bleed,

it hardly feels a thing these days.

All those who love me win my praise.

Point Taken

If acting like a child could keep me young,

I’d look and feel much better than I do:

a logic I can laugh at now once stung

because I caught the drift of it from you.

Union

We make such us of you and me

as can’t define or trace the tie

between the two we used to be:

that compound subject, you and I.

Aubade

A gray

morning

like this

is

good only

for

going back

to

bed with

you

so far

away.