Frank X Walker

Another of my favorite poets featured in the current Appalachian Heritage journal is Frank X Walker, who coined the term Affrilachian Poet. Walker's book about York, the personal slave of William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, is a fasicnating book. The poem below gives you a sample of York's voice. Walker's website is frankxwalker.com; there you will more about his other books, as well as biographical information.

WIND TALKER

---from Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York


“I proceeded on the sandy coast and marked my name on a small pine, the day of the month and year…”
–William Clark, November 19, 1905

If I could make my words dress
they naked selves in blackberry juice
and lay down on a piece a bark, sheep
or onion skin, the way Massa do.
If I could send a story home to my wife
float it in the wind, on wings or water
I’d tell her about Katonka, the buffalo
and all the big wide and high places
this side a the big river.
How his family, numbering three for every
star in the sky, look like a forest when they
graze together, turn into the muddy Mississippi
when they thunder along, faster than any horse,
making the grass lay down
long after the quiet has returned.
How they lead us through the mountain snow
single file, in drifts up to our necks.
How they don’t so much as raise a tail
when I come round with my wooly head
and tobacco skin, like I’m one a them
making the Sioux and Crow think me
“Big Medicine, Katonka who walk like man.”

Today we stood on the edge of all this
and looked out at so much water, the mountains we crossed
to get here seem a little smaller.

As I watched black fish as big as cabins take to the air
and splash back in the water like children playing
I thought about you, us and if we gone ever be free,
then I close my eyes and pray
that I don’t live long enough to see
Massa make this ugly too.





Frank X Walker, photo by Tracy Hawkins

From North Carolina to Iraq

My daughter at home with her dogs.
--------------------------------------
Novelist Vicki Lane, whose blog I read daily (vickilanemysteries.blogspot.com), yesterday gave us a post entitled "Fear." In it she drew together a segment from her novel SIGNS IN THE BLOOD, in which a character comments on a harmless water snake too often killed, because the perpetrator doesn't know the difference between it and a copperhead, and a news report about the killing of three innocent Iraqi civilians by American troops on June 25. The military had said that these civilians, driving to their jobs at a bank, were criminals and thus legitimate targets. That official story turned out to be wrong. "Ignorance combined with fear is a dangerous thing," she concludes.

This set me to remembering.

WOMEN WRITING PLACE, that was the name of the conference in which I participated just days after the invasion of Iraq. Located at Barton College, in Wilson, NC, the writers included Judith Ortiz Cofer, Crystal Wilkinson, Janette Turner Hospital, and me. We read our work, engaged in a panel discussion, and on April 8,l went home. On the drive back, I began reading the Raleigh News and Observer, stopping short at an Associated Press release about civilian casualties in the neighborhood believed to house Saddam Hussein. U.S. planes had bombed it to smithereens, killing numerous civilians, but not Saddam. One of those killed was a 19 year old girl whose mother was keening out her grief. The young woman had been decapitated by the blasts.

I was haunted by that mother wailing over her child, so brutally destroyed, and then and there I began the poem below. To say that this was one of the most difficult poems I ever wrestled with would be an understatement. I thought of it yet again this morning when I read Vicki's post. Ignorance and fear are a dangerous mix, and we have seen too much of it over the last several years, not to mention throughout human history! We know so little about Middle Eastern and Muslim history, culture, and art! And yet we believe we can transform this region, this culture, through bombs.

My daughter at the time was studying Urdu literature at the University of Texas, translating Urdu poetry, considered by those who know it well, to be among the treasures of the literary world. I found the W.S. Merwin lines in C. M. Naim's essay on Ghalib; going through my daugher's old photocopies from her U. of Chicago days, I came upon this, by one of her favorite professors. The essay, and these lines, helped me conclude the poem in a way that retained the humanity of the subject, or so I hoped.


HER DAUGHTER



"Charred dove, nightingale still burning"
—Mirza Ghalib


Baghdad, April 8, 2003

Four years younger than mine,
her daughter lies under the rubble.

She stands at the edge of it,
watching the men lifting one stone,

another, till out of the crater
they gently lift somebody's

body, a body she now
sees is female. She tries to recall

what her daughter was wearing,
but no scrap of clothing remains

on it. Whose body is it? She sees
no face. She sees no head.

At the edge of the crater she stands
while they swaddle the body in blankets

a neighbor has brought. Through
the blasted streets she calls

a name that gets lost
in the rattle of gunfire, a name

no one hears as they pull
from the rubble her daughter's

head, hair twisted round like
a root-wad, not blonde

like my daughter's, not waking
up as my daughter will be, being safe

on this morning in Texas, beginning
to brush her hair after her shower,

her face in the mirror as perfect as
always I see it, the fair skin

she wishes had South Asian
dusk in it, not southern

sun from the fields of her mother's
line, as she examines

the scar on her temple,
the chin she believes looks

not quite smooth
enough, while her fingers

scroll over its surface
as if they are translating

Urdu, word after
unsteady word of a ghazal

that she must recite
today, all the while fearing

her voice will fail
even as she tries

to fill up the silence
with Ghalib's desire

to see, lost in the blaze
of the mirror

that holds her,
the face of the Beloved.


The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/her-daughter. (There's a recording of me reading this poem, but be forewarned---I have a lot of trouble with the Arabic pronunciation of "gh."


My daughter at the University of Chicago graduation.

Glenis Redmond

Glenis Redmond's poem "Footnotes" closes out the new issue of APPALACHIAN HERITAGE, and I will have to give five-star credit to editor George Brosi for that decision, because the poem is, in addition to being a stunner, a piece that lingers in your mind long after you've closed the magazine. Glenis, well-known as a performance poet, has been honing her poetic skills and expanding her poetic territory over the past few years. When I heard her read at the recent Wordfest celebration in Asheville, back in May, I said to my friend and sister-participant Fatemeh Keshavarz, "Yes, indeed!" (Lots of head-nodding going on!) To myself I said, um-humh, she's workin' it; yes ma'am, she is bringin' it! Her villanelle about forsythia is still singing inside my head. So is "Footnotes," where I can find a word like "tote" and remember my grandfather using it, so many years ago. Who uses that word anymore? Glenis brings it back from that "silent edge" over which so much might disappear if we did not have our poets to bring it back to us.

Glenis will have a new book, UNDER THE SUN, coming out from Main Street Rag in late August, so stay tuned to our ncarts.org site, where we will be featuring it. In the meantime, here is "Footnotes."


FOOTNOTES

Glenis Redmond


Where does history go
when it hasn’t been tended?
I say it grows wild amongst
the Periwinkle, the Turkey-foot fern
and my mind. There it is
right along side my heavy heart
like that mass of stones left on a hill
the only remnants left of the Kingdom
speaking of mountain royalty,
King Robert and Queen Louella
leased for ten cents a day
by a Civil War widow, named Serpta.
Their rule over 200 acres
of chopping, hauling and toting.
I understand this urgency
the need of self-appointment.
I hear it in the restless wind on the ridge
or are those ancestral voices crying out
about the uneasy quilt stitch heresay
of their lives being left to myth and lore?
Where does history go when it dies?
When corn cribs and makeshift houses
no longer riddle the mountain slopes
and forty years of hands culling
Comfrey into a healing balm
along with Gospel Songs cease.
This silent edge is where I live
filled with heartache remembering history
and where it goes without a foothold.

Appalachian Heritage Quarterly

In my next few posts I will be featuring work from the new African American issue of APPALACHIAN HERITAGE journal.
Go to http://community.berea.edu/appalachianheritage/ to learn more about this publication.





Red Dirt Blues


Craziness in
concentric interlocking circles.
But look closely
at old photographs.
See? That heaviness
at the corners of
the mouth. Even in
smiles, the lips
turn down
in sadness. Familial, communal
concentric interlocking sadness

binding

------doris davenport

The Mystery of the Present Moment

This title sounds like one a poet would choose, doesn't it? It comes from novelist Milan Kundera, however, and I've lifted it from his most recent book, THE CURTAIN, by way of DOCUMENT, a publication of the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. Kundera writes of "...the richness contained in a single second of life," and also makes mention of "the existential scandal of insignificance." I found these phrases in Sylvia Plachy's introduction to the collection of work entitled 25 UNDER 25, showcasing twenty-five American photographers under the age of 25. Plachy maintains that these three phrases sum up most photographers' concerns as well.

I'd say they sum up most artists' concerns, regardless of genre or medium. Not to mention most gardeners, quilters, parents, and teachers, to limit myself to a short list. Artists' concerns may be felt and expressed more passionately, in terms of sharing the vision that animates their work, perhaps. But I've always felt that anybody can step into what Eavan Boland calls "the center of the lyric moment."

I've always wanted passion in my own work, as well as the work of artists to whom I give my attention. Passion roots us to the here and now.

This time of year, the passion flowers are spreading over the grass around our garden. I'm glad to have them there. I wish they could bloom all year long, but it's up to me to keep them blooming in other ways after they have shut down for another season.

Previews of Coming Attractions

I am rich in poets, if not in love ( tipping my hat to Josephine Humphreys for her novel, Rich In Love...), and I plan to introduce them over the next several weeks to readers of my blog. I will preview some of them beforehand, to whet your appetite, so today, let me begin with my friend Nancy Simpson. I met Nancy years ago when my daughter was only a few months old. She invited me to Hayesville to read, and of course I went, babe in arms, to the reading, where I met not only Nancy but also other writers who have been my friends for thirty years--Steve Harvey, Janice Townley Moore, Bettie Sellers, among others.
Here is Nancy, sitting on her porch with her dog Sasha. We read together last week at Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, for the NC Arts Council's Board of Directors.



Nancy has two manuscripts of poetry in circulation. Living Above the Frost Line is the one from which I'll be choosing poems to share with you. I find these poems both passionate and tightly controlled. I hope this manuscript finds a publisher soon.

Finding Mary Adams

My latest post on Mary Adams ended up beneath my Dogs post, so please scroll down past them to find her poems and the various photos! Sorry about the glitch.