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[with poems by the 2023 Tremont Poetry Cohort]
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Awaken
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You came because the river quiets your soul,
the sassafras soothes and sweetgum settles.
Have you gotten your breath? Do you remember who you are?
Leave us, now; it’s our time to sleep. You go, awake.
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Sarah Small / Alcoa, Tennessee
postcard – Mother bear & cubs
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The Little River is singing ‘October Blues’ and I can listen if I’ll just roll down my window. Leaving the Smokies on a Sunday morning, who would have imagined such a glut of traffic, but I can make the choice to gentle my right foot and blend with the flow. And here on the right comes another choice: I pull off at Chimneys and flush the press of schedule and itinerary from my mind.
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A ten minute climb into old growth hardwood cove and road noise no longer penetrates. Every few steps another chipmunk whistles its alarm. Fecund – whoever coined that word was smelling this place. The carpet is bright green hepatica saving up to flower in just a few months, the understory is summer seedhead bounty and autumn wood asters blooming like crazy, and the overstory is way up there, crooked and knobbed, reaching and mingling and only allowing an occasional glimpse of Balsam Point.
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I’ve been waiting since breakfast and now I pull out the small slip of lined paper Renée gave me, a personal parting note; she prepared one for each of us in the cohort. “Read it later,” she had said. I’m going to trust she won’t mind if I share one line: “I came to this conference with some heaviness and I’m leaving with light and a sense of belonging.” A mystery, a wonder, an inexplicable blessing that in just a few days eight strangers can so deeply connect.
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[untitled]
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You’re not a flightless bird,
+++++ your wings held tight
against your breast;
+++++ unfurl your plumage,
Go from here with boldness,
+++++ revel in your glory.
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Jeannine Jordan / Lima, Ohio
postcard – Wild Turkey
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Community
(the Park speaks)
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Inspire, breath in, be filled with spirit –
think I’d tip you like a funnel and pour
right in? Look around this circle and take
a lesson from the Queen of Connection.
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Bill Griffin / Elkin, North Carolina
postcard – entrance to GSMNP
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Frank fans the deck and asks us each to select one. They’re postcards, of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, face down so we can’t see what we’ve picked. “The card has picked you,” Frank suggests. “What is it telling you about why you are here and what you’ll take with you when you leave?”
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This is our last exercise during our last session of this inaugural Tremont Writers’ Conference. Can it be only three days ago that Frank X Walker introduced himself to us as an artist who speaks Poet? Besides the language of linebreak and word choice, what Frank so incisively speaks is creativity, challenge, connection, community. Oh yes, we learn to critique each other’s poems through his quiet observations. Yes, we engage in color studies and sound studies and we write to prompts. But Frank is not teaching us to be writers – he is teaching us to be human. His carefully considered comments touch our gifts and expose our needs, and even more than that he weaves us seven into a whole whose true commitment is to bring out the best in each other.
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After ten or fifteen minutes of writing – channeling the voice we are hearing in our card’s image – Frank stops us and presents his next to last prompt: now break that all down into four lines. We probably should have seen this coming. We really aren’t ready, though, for his final instruction. He has us each pass our card two people to the left, write our home address on the fresh card we’re holding, then pass it back right to its original owner. Each of us will write our four-line poem on our card and mail it, and in a few days we will each receive a poem from one other member of the cohort.
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We won’t be driving home from this gathering to resume our scribbling in isolation. We will be watching the mailbox (and text messages) with a tingle. We are now a creative family. We are connected.
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The Experience
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Like me, a yearling bear,
caged and carried away.
You came for the experience.
Imagine me gone. Write it.
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Kim Hayes / Weaverville, North Carolina
postcard – Ursus americanus, Black Bear
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Somewhere, Sometime
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Sunlight in this open field
Safely wander, graze
Trust the treeline
Grow. (I am growing, too.)
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Suzanne Bell / Pisgah Forest, North Carolina
postcard – deer graze in Cades Cove
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Connecting People with Nature is the motto of Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Amen! In completing the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program at Tremont, I have felt the web of connections forged there welling up in me and changing me. One begins with the name of a thing, then comes to recognize how it makes its living and gets along with its neighbors, until at last there dawns an appreciation of the deep interdependence and kinship of all life, place, and planet. One living community.
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But if ecology is the study of living communities, poetry also has its ecology. How does the poem bring together all these living bits that make it come alive? Its images, its allusions, its music? How does the poem make its world equally real to or perhaps even more real than the world speeding by outside my window?
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It seems to me that the technique we learn at Tremont, the Naturalist Method, is entirely congruent with the Poetic Method – Pay Attention; Ask Questions; Make Connections; Share. All of this we try to do when we “speak Poet.” And Frank X Walker has certainly enabled every bit of this in us during our few days of communion with mountains, rivers, bears, each other. It is a language of laughter and surprise. It is a language of change and growth. It is a language of discovery, insight, and awe. We are leaving Tremont bubbling with its voice and overflowing with its joy. Poetry, and Nature, are how we connect.
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[untitled]
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Born on the top, nestled through the sides, tumbled to the bottom.
Again and again.
Those mountains captured and created.
Then they carried.
Renée Whitmore / Vass, North Carolina
postcard – sunrise through mountains in Cades Cove
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Clouds in my Skin
You are here
Not to burn through the mist
To roll around in the slick slopes
Of your soft hope—this knowing, this peace
Sophia Fortunato / Bozeman, Montana
postcard – mountain ridges fading into blue mist
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The Poetry Cohort of the First Tremont Writers’ Conference, October 15-29, 2023, is Jeannine Jordan, Bill Griffin, Sophia Fortunato, Sarah Small, Renée Whitmore, Kim Hayes, and Suzanne Bell. Our teacher, mentor, guide, and brother is Frank X Walker from Lexington, Kentucky, speaker of poetry, professor at University of Kentucky, and former state Poet Laureate.
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Other instructors at this inaugural conference are Janet McCue (Non-Fiction) and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle (Fiction) and the featured speaker is Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory. Jeremy Lloyd, Tremont Manager of Field and College Programs, has been the primary organizer, assisted by Tremont staff Elizabeth Davis, Erin Cantor, Lyndsey Kessler, education director John DiDiego, and many others.
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This conference was also made possible through the integral participation and partnership of Great Smoky Mountains Association and Creative Services Director Frances Figart. Thank you!
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thank you, Mary Alice. The side benefit of cleaning off one's desk occasionally. ---B