V E R S E ❦ I M A G E

After the reading I’m talking to Worthy Evans, admiring his poems.  He says, “I think I have multiple personality disorder.”  I say, “Must come in handy.”  And doesn’t it though.

Worthy’s new book from University of South Carolina Press, Green Revolver, is populated by a neighborhood, an entire quirky village of personalities.  They are on maneuvers waiting on edge for their enemy; staring at incomprehensible instructions on the computer screen in their cubicle; watching an orange-vested family build a sky-scraper; lying in a hospital bed with a puffy head covered with bandages.  Whatever they’re doing, it seems serenely commonplace, like you and I could be doing it, too.  You and I and Rod Serling.

The poems can be dark, disturbing, or simply quizzical, but hearing Worthy read them they develop into a universe warmly personal.  Not just personal in that there’s his own portrait in each, framed by the hole sawed in the wooden barricade at a construction site where passers by can watch the action.  And not just the personal history that filters up through the mundane circumstances: soldier, journalist, cubical drone.  No, more than that the poems become personal because I the listener/reader am invited right into the mild chaos that accompanies everything we do day to day, if we really think about it.  Family life, work, interpersonal politics, it all really is a little strange, isn’t it?  I feel much better now.  I feel better now that Worthy accompanies me on this strange trip.  Hey, we’re all in it together.

.     .     .     .     .

Naked-flowering Tick Trefoil

Pre-Op

Dan Jones is coming to meet with us.
All of us, Monday at 2:30 p.m.  Dan
Jones will meet with all of us two
days from now.  It is all we were
told.  Neil Diggs walked up and gave us
the tip, but he didn’t say why Dan
Jones was going to meet with us,
or who Dan Jones is and what
kinds of business Dan Jones was
after.  Dan Jones could be a barber, and
for all I know that’s what he is.  I looked
down to see what Dan Jones did to me,
the hair on the floor, a drop of blood
smeared onto my pant leg when the clipping
became fierce.  I heard opera music and
saw a delicate white hand cross over
cold steel instruments resting on the soft linen.
Tulips grew in the garden outside
the window where Dan Jones, the faculty
and I were meeting to discuss budget cuts.
All of us topping our shaggy manes until Dan Jones
rides by on his penny-farthing to give us a clip.

.      .     .     .     .

Never visit Asheville without stopping by Malaprop’s, at the corner of Walnut and Haywood.  It is the best independent bookstore on the planet.  The cool stuff, the Smoky Mtn. Roasters, the Ashevillians, oh yeah and the books – I could live there.  Tell Virginia “Bill says Hi.”

Green Revolver at Malaprop’s Books and Cafe

Charleston City Paper Article about Worthy Evans

Green Revolver at USC Press