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Poetry at Cary Arts Center

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Cary Arts Center, imagery, Mark Cox, Michael Hettich, Narya Rose Deckard, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, North Carolina Poetry Society, poetry, Southern writing on September 26, 2025| 7 Comments »

NCPS Program VP Chad Knuth

NC Poetry Society at the Cary Arts Center

[poetry by award winners Mark Cox, Michael Hettich, and more]

All Right

The boy doesn’t know what to do. He’s only twelve. And he’s never seen adults weep, not like this at least, so distraught, disconsolate. He can see his grandmother from the kitchen, through her bedroom doorway. Prisoner of her dementia, the old woman lies fully clothed atop the chenille bedspread, her floral house dress faded, her shoes scuffed and worn, light from one window cutting her in two. Her good dishes have disappeared, the piano is still in the old farmhouse, the cows need to be milked, her young sons are still in France at war. The boy sits at the breakfast table, adrift in a sunlit swirl of dust motes. He understands none of this is true, but how is he to help? What can anyone say? To live is to leave, the boy thinks; we make our way, but lose something always and wherever we go. Our shoe soles wear down, our hair thins, our bodies diminish and so we travel always through galaxies of our own shed lint and skin, the leavings of once known things. Finally, at a loss, he just lies down next to her, his sneakers alongside her purpled ankles. He knows nothing ever is going to be all right, but he says it anyway.

Mark Cox

from Knowing, winner of the 2025 Brockman-Campbell Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society

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Mark Cox is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. His six previous books include Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017) and Readiness (2018). Read more about Knowing and purchase your copy at Press 53 HERE.

Claudine Moreau is second place finalist for the 2025 Brockman-Campbell Award, for her book Demise of Pangaea. Visit this site on October 3 for more about her book and a sample poem.

Mark Cox

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Each September at its fall meeting the North Carolina Poetry Society features readings by the winners of the following contests:

Brockman-Campbell Book Award (NCPS): best book of poetry published by a North Carolina author in the preceding year

Lena Shull Manuscript Award (NCPS): for a manuscript by a North Carolina author; the winning book is published by NCPS

Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship (NCPS): a one week residential fellowship at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities for one North or South Carolina poet

Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize (sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network): for an individual poem by a North Carolina author

Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Award (co-sponsored by North Carolina Literary Review at East Carolina University and NCPS): for an individual poem recited / performed

For information about North Carolina Poetry Society contests VISIT HERE:

In 2023 the September NCPS meeting was held at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh, in 2024 at the NC Arboretum in Asheville, and this year’s meeting on September 13 celebrated the Cary Arts Center, formerly the Cary High School (1939), listed on the national registry of historic places. Today’s and next Friday’s posts feature some of the poetry shared at the meeting by the 2025 contest winners; return to this site on October 3 for more offerings!

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The Meadow

++++ I woke in a tall-grass field at first light,

and listened to the birds, and hummed with a dream

++++ ++++ I made up from wisps

++++ that ran through my body

++++ ++++ shivering marrow, making me notice

++++ the dew that dampened

my face and the spider webs

++++ starting to shimmer the trees.

Everything was breathing; the long night echoed

++++ in the dawn-light: stars

++++ ++++ and vast migrations

++++ as the breeze stuttered a moment, then stilled.

++++ Across the field, my companion was singing

++++ ++++ her own perfect song, which was silence. Still

++++ ++++ ++++ I could hear her somehow, so I got up and set off

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ to thank her for sharing this beautiful place

++++ ++++ ++++ she’d known all her life, this place where she’d always

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ felt happy, the place she yearned to stay

++++ ++++ as long as she breathed. And then, she’d told me,

++++ she’d turn into something more perfect: the vast

sky, so blue it hurt the eyes,

++++ or a meadow like this one, that stretched to the horizon.

Michael Hettich

from Waking Up Alone, winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Manuscript Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society, to be published later this year by Redhawk Publications.

Michael Hettich

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After years in New York, Colorado, Florida, and Vermont, Michael Hettich now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and taught for many years at Miami Dade College where he was awarded an Endowed Teaching Chair. Over five decades he has published more than two dozen books of poetry and received numerous honors, including several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, and a Florida Book Award.

Additional Finalists for this year’s Lena Shull Award are Becky Nicole James and Charles Wheeler.

Michael Hettich

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Feathers

When September slips in the window like a forgotten lover,

Reaching for me from my burrow

+++++++++++++++++++++ With its hands of feathers

In the early morning croak of crows, and I can smell

That someone has lit a fire,

+++++++++++++++++++++ An utterance of feathers,

Such that I can’t remember if I’m seven, in a log house my father built,

And he’s kindled the first autumn fire,

+++++++++++++++++++++ Fanned the feathers,

Or I’m twenty-five in the wooded hollow alone

But for the cats, dogs, and calls of coyotes, having lit the fire myself

+++++++++++++++++++++ That spanned feathers,

But no, when you roll over

In a twist of sheets,

+++++++++++++++++++++ In a band of feathers,

And I hear a young tail thump softly on the floor, a brief whine-

When someone else’s woodsmoke slips through the window

+++++++++++++++++++++ Like sanded feathers,

And I am here with you, and we’ve struck our own match-

When you reach across and slip your arm around my waist,

+++++++++++++++++++++ With the sustenance of feathers-

Narya Rose Deckard

Narya Rose Deckard

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Narya Rose Deckard teaches writing at Lenoir-Rhyne University, where she earned her MFA in poetry at the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative. Originally from the mountains of Maryland, she currently lives in Valdese, NC with her husband, dog, five cats, and a few chickens, but she also spent ten years in Asheville studying literature and philosophy at UNCA. As winner of the 2025 Susan Laugher Meyers Fellowship, she receives an honorarium and one week writing residency in Southern Pines at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Susan Laughter Meyers was a widely published Carolina poet who mentored many rising poets and promoted literature across the South for decades. She served at different times as president of both the South Carolina and North Carolina Poetry Societies. Her family, friends, students, and other admirers of her life’s work have endowed this Fellowship in her name for the North Carolina Poetry Society. Many thanks to Weymouth Center, as well, for donating space and support for the poet residency.

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Begin With Me

I got up

off the ground

near some graves—I share

the last name with.

I begin,

with what I was handed,

a mama, a daddy I saw a few times,

because he hid

in the hues he knew.

My little brother full of love

like the corner store in heaven. I knew

his lying like I knew our daddy’s lying,

same song, but a higher key.

My mama taught me to

ask my dead plenty of questions—

to let the moon touch me on the mouth,

to ring my black bell.

Tyree Daye

Tyree Daye

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Tyree Daye led the writing workshop for the afternoon session of this NCPS meeting, He focused on breath: within and around a poem; what it might reveal and what it might hide. The writer can strive to become more conscious of their own breath as they splice syllables and thump out the poem’s rhythm. The reader can strive to slow down and feel their own breath as they silently speak the words. Breath can hold the meaning and feeling that the poem wants to birth into the world. Hold it, and let it out.

Tyree Daye grew up in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of three poetry collections, including River Hymns (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize), Cardinal, and most recently a little bump in the earth. He has been a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. He serves as Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Tyree Daye teaches. Not just reading and writing, not just poetry – he teaches what it means to be human, a human with a past and with a future. One reaction to his new book: Poem by poem, Daye is honoring the people of Youngsville and “bringing back the dead.”

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Tune in next week, folks . . . in our October 3 post we will continue to celebrate the riches of this September 13 meeting in Cary with poetry by Claudine Moreau, Becky Nicole James, Charles Wheeler, and more.

Tyree Daye

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Joan Barasovska and Kathy Ackerman, Membership VP and NCPS Secretary

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Discover

Posted in Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, bloodroot, imagery, Knowing, Mark Cox, nature, nature photography, NC Poets, Plant evolution, poetry, Southern writing on April 5, 2024| 3 Comments »

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[with two prose poems by Mark Cox]

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Poem at Forty I Could Not Finish Until I Turned Sixty

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The seas below our house pitch deep and soundless. Like sweat engrained in handrails, or the oil darkened edges of our dining room table, every shadow implies more shadow.

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Late summer has quieted the cicadas, damped their dwindling number with the lastness of their deaths. There is a chill to the air, no wind at all. My youngest son is twenty days old, feeble, burrowing in and out of awareness, still unsure his body isn’t trying to kill him. He cries to eat, he cries to sleep, he cries as his tiny gut rejects what all must go to waste.

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Last week, scientists discovered the bones of a humanoid who fell into a well shaft three million years ago. His wife said he’d turn up! That the world has no pity for the individual life, this is no secret to anyone, yet we just can’t get over it. I am here in the middle of a bed, in the middle of the night, in the middle of my life, my son nestled as if he were my own bones, as if we’ve both toppled forty years down into positions we’ll retain forever. There is no chiropractor for the soul.

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The museum of loss has at last opened its doors to me. Scholars cannot agree, the docents say, but almost certainly arms encircling the body was an omen of intimacy. Little is known of the fabled kiss; what remains of crude glyphs and mosaic shards indicate our elders once believed that souls were exchanged. One cannot, of course, touch anything in the museum of oss. One can only view what was once there. Nothing can be imagined and remain the same.

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Just what does this portend? There will always be a thermos next to the detonator, a pair of reading glasses weighting the sentence handed down without mercy. An airman in WWII, John Ciardi recounted how once from the blister all gunners sat in, he watched the bomber beside him burning. His counterpart waved up as that other plane went down.

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Each age has its designated bandwidth. Without warning, my son is twenty and in love. We are belted in. Splitting space. In his lap, he holds one hand with another, as if to keep its fingers from detaching, as if I’d helped him hurry to the car, and was driving to a hospital. I want my tree back the way it was, he whined, one autumn morning. He was four or so and knew even then what he’s now not able to share.

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Much is felt that resists being known. If there are seven billion human beings on earth, then every day is 19 million years of experience, just all at once. Somehow, I find this comforting, though by now you’d think we’d know what we are doing.

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Mark Cox

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Better to resist the flux and believe that something stays. At last, he thinks, that is his answer. How still it all is, so utterly clear. Then one bright leaf lets go and changes everything.

++++++Knowing, Mark Cox

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It all begins with a question. No, that comes second, first there’s noticing, and noticing that something is different. Wait, even before the noticing there has to be paying attention. No, no, it all begins with this: just being there, moving through the world, part of all the changes.

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Joe just texted Cynthia and me a remarkable photo taken along a path we’ve walked together more than a few times. Looks like Bloodroot – nothing else has those freaky leaves emerging from the earth like fingers of the undead – but the petals are different. Instead of a circle of daisy-like petals (radial symmetry) they are bunched and doubled. And the center is almost naked as a belly button.

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A hybrid, we ask ourselves? But there are no other species in genus Sanguinaria with which to hybridize. A mutant, then. Sure enough, we discover online images of Bloodroot Multiplex with these peony-like blossoms, all of them propagated from a spontaneous mutation first discovered in Ohio years ago. Sterile flowers in which the stamens have reverted to petals. Evolution amok. Now we have the same mutation here in our backyard.

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Plants that make flowers first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago. Their flowers left the seeds exposed – they were naked (gymnosperms = conifers and gingko). Gymnosperms ruled for over 200 million years until the first flowering plants evolved forms that keep their seeds enclosed. But the outcome of the mutations that eventually resulted in plants with such protected seeds, angiosperms, was so successful that they have filled the earth with their variety and diversity. Every plant you see with flowers blooming this spring is an angiosperm (and even a lot whose flowers you don’t see, like grass for goodness sake).

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The enclosing ovary which cradles the ovule which will become the seed – what an excellent evolutionary idea! It most likely developed from mutations in fertile leaves which caused progressive curling and enfolding. All the parts of the flower – sepal, petal, stamen – are specialized modified leaves. But whenever we discover a Bloodroot flower with more than eight petals, we can assume that some of the extra petals are stamens which have turned back the evolutionary clock to become petals again.

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Is there anything we can hold on to that stays, fixed and static? Is it even possible to imagine something that never changes? Do I even really know what I think I know?

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There is only one thing that each and every one of us knows. Mark Cox reminds us what it is in Knowing – it’s something no one likes to talk about, but something Mark’s poetry is able to face and say in a hundred ways until we readers become more than willing to join the conversation. We’ve known it all along, maybe at times we’ve even braced for the brief plunge toward otherness, but in these prose poems we have a guide and a friend who is just as afraid as we are but braver about sharing his fear.

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Does a prose poem occupy some evolutionary niche between verse and narrative? Forget its phenotype: brevity, blockiness, absent linebreaks. What’s down deeper in its DNA? It seems to carry all the genes of its poetry forebears – language and imagery, rhythm and music, even internal rhyme – but it is its own genus. Unlike a story, it has no beginning, middle, and end – it is all middle. Crisis and denouement might embrace each other in the same line. (And can we even call them lines when they are all one? Sort of like the question how many grooves there are on a 33 ⅓ rpm LP.) In the poem, everything is happening, but how is it happening? Oh wait, as I read the poem everything is happening in me.

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And what happens in me over and over as I read these poems, as it dawns on me that the one thing we all know, each and every one of us, is that we will die, is this: I look up from the page and talk to myself. I query, I wonder, I argue, I confess. I pick up the threads of so many internal conversations left dangling because they were difficult, or scary, or just pushed out of the present by quotidian distractions. I’m not saying that by reading a book by Mark Cox titled Knowing I have gained or been granted my own cosmic knowing. But I have been reminded that I want to.

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Music Box

++ For Ralph Angel

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Everything’s just peachy, comes the world report: all clear. We are not pirouetting on the tip of time’s scalpel; we are not screwing deeper into the ground’s veneer. It is just the fleeting dance we do until the delicate box closes, having learned now to bow before hurting ourselves.

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Today is Thursday once again and the man next door is off to get his mail. He will wander back reading, as is his wont to do, his wizened leashed dachshund dog sniffing the leaves. The breeze passes over our shrubs and still they stand. A wary sparrow peers from them be we shouldn’t call it hiding.

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Yes, we have learned how to brace for the brief plunge toward otherness. We have learned to keep our eyes open to the dark, even if it doesn’t matter. We see most vividly what cannot be seen, and this is always the case.

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In the caves of our past, flames flickered on the rough walls. Fear grew there beyond reason and all sense of proportion. Our shadows have always been bigger than we are, the house lights shining up as they do, not down.

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It would make sense to be offered a tune now. Something simple and genuine, a tale of longing fulfilled. Something to do with a childhood nightlight, a mother’s cool palm. Whatever it is, it will have to be a memory wound long ago.

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Such a blessing might be broadcast from just about anywhere. We receive it on this bureau with no clue wherefrom it issues, which ancient satellite or lofty transmission tower. On and off like a warning beacon, the message beams. Once all is said, one has no choice but to choose. Call it grace, call it wonder, just, as they say, keep it calling.

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Mark Cox

Music Box first appeared in The Connecticut River Review

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Mark Cox is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. His six previous books include Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017) and Readiness (2018). Read more about and purchase Knowing at Press 53 HERE

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