Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Michael Hettich’

Anticipate

Posted in Ecopoetry, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 27, 2024| 10 Comments »

 . 
[with poems by Michael Hettich, Kenneth Chamlee, Katherine Soniat]
 . 
First View – Chicago Lakes
 . 
Sleet needles past my fastened collar
as we rise into the house of rain.
Mr. Byers of the Mountain News
has horsed us up this flyspeck path
with avowals of Alpine views but
now is silent. I think he has missed
the spur trail. My blood is gelid,
fingers numb beyond recovery.
Clouds tickle and drip and when we crest
this timbered ridge I will ask that-Oh!
Sublime cirque! The Alps surpassed again!
Stay the mules-I must-I need my paints,
stool. Fifteen minutes, please you; see how
the near lake mirrors the breaking storm
with light fine as milkweed fluff, that one
pearled peak soft as the edge of heaven!
 . 
Kenneth Chamlee
from The Best Material for the Artist in the World; Albert Bierstadt, a Biography in Poems, Stephen F. Austin University Press, Nacogdoches TX; © 2023. Finalist for the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina writer.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
First Nature, Once Removed
 . 
Is childhood different from any body of (loose) clothing or rising water? Make
of it what you will. +++ I did. +++ +++ Some are grounded by target practice
 . 
but return with leaks known as homesickness for life. +++ +++ Wobbly
flotilla of cargo I was . . . no water-wings to inflate. Imagine those wings
 . 
I did not have +++ but suspected were present +++ when it was calm enough
to reflect and pull faces into focus. +++ +++ Wishing is like sadness at sea.
 . 
Say, you are on a beach with waves – the circular myth of family collapsing.
I had this part-time job of being a daughter apart – job that paid in tips
 . 
for those with damp inward pauses. +++ +++ Deep water girl
who keeps washing up anywhere. +++ +++ +++ Everywhere.
 . 
I was a surprise to those gathered in bed. +++ How I rose to float in
on a man and woman dancing in bed. +++ +++ Or were they clouds?
 . 
I could not keep them straight +++ +++ (though they were trying
hard to act happy) +++ like knives flying simultaneously as birds
 . 
at twilight.
 . 
Katherine Soniat
from Fates: Starfish Washup, Etruscan Press, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre PA; © 2023. Finalist for the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina writer.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Parents
 . 
One morning, my wife and I followed our eight-year-old
daughter along a crowded beach
just far enough behind her that she wasn’t aware
we followed, as she walked with her energetic stride,
swinging her arms as though she were singing.
 . 
We marveled at her independence, at her
fearlessness; we compared her to other
children we knew, who would never have ventured
so far with such self-confidence.
 . 
We were congratulating ourselves on our excellent parenting
skills, laughing proudly at her spirit,
wondering where she was going with such
lively determination, when she stopped
 . 
and turned to look back: she was crying, with such
deep heaves she could hardly, breathe, desperately
lost. She’d been frantically looking for us
and the place we’d left our towels–she feared
we’d forgotten her, gone home without her.
 . 
What could we say, kneeling beside her
in the bright sun–we’d been right there
the whole time, behind her, laughing affectionately
at the way she walked, as she walked
 . 
the wrong direction to find us, at the way
she looked from behind as she searched for us,
as she howled in such terror
we thought she was singing?
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems, 1990-2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2023. Winner of the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina writer.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Which is better, to expect beauty and encounter exactly that, or to arrive without expectation or anticipation and be surprised by joy? Which is worse, to open the window on a forecast of sun and discover drizzle, or to walk around every day under a cloud with no awareness of a sun above? Which is worse, to tool around for years just one county removed from your anger, or to cross the line and smack into it head on? Which is better, fond memories of the past or even fonder memories of the future?
 . 
Each of today’s three poems appears in books selected by Eric Pankey, this year’s judge of the Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society: winner Michael Hettich for The Halo of Bees and finalists Kenneth Chamlee, The Best Material for the Artist in the World, and Katherine Soniat, Starfish Washup. What if everything we can sense and see turns into something wholly unexpected? Don’t the most beautiful creatures sometime pack the deadliest stings? What if even time itself slips us up, the solid past dissolving into mist and mud, this moment twisting inside out like a Moebius strip? What if a poem doesn’t begin or flow or lead us where we anticipated, and what if it doesn’t end as we hoped?
 . 
❦
 . 
Emerging from COVID’s virtual meetingspaces two years ago, the NC Poetry Society made a studied decision to emerge as well from its long tradition of meeting four times each year in Southern Pines at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. Last September’s meeting convened at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Each September meeting serves to showcase readings by contest winners: the Brockman-Campbell Book Award (NCPS); the Lena Shull Poetry Manuscript Award (NCPS); the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition (NC Writers Network); the Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship (NCPS and co-sponsor Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities); and the Jackie Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize (NCPS in partnership with NC Literary Review and East Carolina University).
 . 
This September 14 NCPS gathered at the North Carolina Arboretum outside Asheville. As if award winning readings in such a beautiful venue were not enough, the afternoon program connected the gardens, mountains, and wild spaces into a workshop by Kathrine Cays, “Writing the Natural World.” Kathrine offered many prompts and led a guided meditation to coax us to listen to the voices of earth and sky around us, and to the voice within us that reaches to connect with nature. (See last week’s poem by Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest, which Kathrine read to open her workshop.) How can I sense the communities and individuals that create my world? What do flower, tree, bird, beetle want to say to each other, and to me? How can I discover my true place on earth and return gratitude and reverence in a way that sustains me, and sustains the earth?
 . 
 . 
 . 
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2024 Contest Winners
 . 
Brockman-Campbell Award: given annually to the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina poet during the past year
Winner: Michael Hettich, The Halo of Bees
Finalist: Katherine Soniat, Starfish Washup
 . 
Lena Shull Award: honors the best manuscript of unpublished poetry written by a native or resident of North Carolina
Winner: Doug Sutton-Ramspeck, Smoke Memories
Honorable Mention: Maura High, Field as Auditorium
Honorable Mention: Becky Nichole James, Little Draughts and Hurricanes
 . 
Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship: in honor of the life and work of Susan Laughter Meyers; co-sponsor Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities
Winner: John Amen
Honorable Mention: Maria Martin, Terri McCord, Claudine R. Moreau, Erica Takacs
 . 
Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize: honors the best performance poem by a writer who fits the NCLR definition of a North Carolina writer; co-sponsor North Carolina Literary Review / East Carolina University
1st Place: Edward Mabrey
2nd Place: Jess Kennedy
3rd Place: Marcial “CL” Harper
Honorable Mention: Alessandra Nysether-Santos, Regina YC Garcia, Brenda Bailey
 . 
Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition: one poem by any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network; sponsored by NCWN
Winner: Lee Stockdale
Honorable Mention: Jackson Benton, Mary Alice Dixon
More information about all North Carolina Poetry Society contests HERE
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
 . 

Read Full Post »

Magic?

Posted in family, music, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on July 14, 2023| 17 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Michael Hettich]
 . 
Abide with Me (excerpt)
 . 
That first year together, we lived in the shadow
of a fishing line factory, next to a super
highway, under a railroad bridge,
 . 
behind a field of junked cars – mountains
of tires, hub caps, and smashed glass – and we
 . 
prayed fervently for our love to return
this world to the poised grace we could imagine
when we touched each other just right, or when we saw sunlight
glint on the stream full of chemicals and junk
that ran by the factory walls.
 . 
We prayed with our yearning. That year we could float things
in midair on the hymns
we sang in perfect harmony.
 . 
We practiced one hymn – “Abide With Me” –
until we could lift cancered minnows from that stream,
until we could lift stray cats and junkyard dogs,
until we could lift each other as high
as our voices carried. We harmonized versions
 . 
of our families and secrets, until we could float
each other in unison, knowing if we fell silent
for even on moment, we’d fall . . .
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
When did I lose my knack for magic? Oh, I can still work what from a distance appears to be magic. I can wiggle my nose and make a seven-year old girl laugh. I can pull from my tall black hat the Latin binomial for obscure little flowers that most people don’t even consider flowers. I can perform any number of spells that compel my wee ancient mother to say , “You’re such a good boy.”
 . 
I don’t mean I can’t work magic; I mean I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack of magic working me. This morning the home health aide arrived to ride herd on Mom and Dad so I could spend the morning on the beach with grandson Bert and friends. The kid dads had planned some long postponed surf fishing; while Anthony dug for mole crabs, Josh whirled the casting net into the waves and hoped for minnows. On the third throw he brought up two tiny pompano the size of silver dollars and slipped them into a blue plastic bucket of sea water.
 . 
Bert, Wyatt, and Mari were more than rapt. The magic of flipping silvery fishes totally captured them and transported them into a new realm. Who would have thought four- and five-year olds could stare into a bucket for a solid hour? The magic of touching those velvet smooth wriggles, the magical bigness of becoming the ones responsible for bringing fresh water from the waves and moving the bucket with the shifting shade, the shocking magic of closeness, even intimacy, with something up until now just so many pictures in books – the magic worked those children. I witnessed their magic and regret to confess that I until I did I had only seen those little fish as bait.
 . 
That same evening I drove Mom and Dad over to Bogue Sound – Josh and Bert were going to catch a crab. The tide was right; the dead fish on a string was acceptably fragrant; the blue crab crept closer through the reeds. On his second try, Josh scooped up the dangerous decapod with a dip net and untangled his swimmerets and claws until he plopped into the blue bucket of sound water. A feisty one! Every time Bert moved his hand, the crab snapped claws up out of the water with undaunted ferocity. Bert was magic-smacked. “I never thought I would get this close to a real crab!” This from the boy with a hundred plastic sea creatures of every class, order, and family.
 . 
Perhaps I’ve lost the knack to be worked by magic because I read too much about and spend too little time staring into the blue depths of this unrelentingly odd and utterly magical universe. Perhaps the only hope for me is to catch a little magic as it streams off the children who are still so joyously connected to it. Or perhaps there are others also willing to share their magic. Those persons around me who are inching ever nearer to the magic as the long years of their living come ever nearer to their ending. Driving home from Bert and the Sound at dusk, Mom riding shotgun, I mention, “This is a good time of evening to see bunnies, Mom. Keep your eyes peeled.”
 . 
We turn the corner and Mom spots her at once, a fat cottontail smack in the middle of the neighbor’s lawn. And then we see her two smaller companions, the three of them considering us and chewing thoughtfully as we pass. Mom laughs and claps. “Oh Billy, how did you know we’d see bunnies? It’s just like magic!”
 . 
❦
 . 
One magic that poetry works is to occupy a different life. In Michael Hettich’s poems, he often seems to occupy several lives, each one exceedingly strange and each entirely commonplace. Through the thirty some years that the poems in this collection occupy, the writer walks around trying on other people’s lives. The surprise of his body may be rivers, trees, dry grass, a child sprouting wings. Bodies may be seedpods or they may burst into flame, they might be figures that dissolve into night or into water. These strange and wonderful transpositions and transformations are not fearful or repulsive – we as readers simply step into these bodies with Michael and become part of the magic.
 . 
This is the magic of wildness. Repeatedly, the poems remind us and display for us how wildness is at the heart of each of us. And this is the magic of music, not that the poem uses music to achieve its end but that the noise the world makes is music — poem discovers it and it reveals magic. So many of Michael’s characters sing. Or become song. Those not known for music as well as those whose music we have shut out of our busy non-wild lives. Michael sings, his wife sings, his father and family sing, and the songs weave magic that levitates and elevates and brings joy. When the ringing of my ears and of my machines has deafened me to the everything that makes up this universe of ours – the only known residence, after all, of magic – I know I can return to these poems and be restored.
 . 
The Halo of Bees, New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, Michael Hettich. Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023
Today’s post features “Selected” poems from the collection. Also see last week’s post, Catch Fire, which features “New” poems.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Frogs
 . 
He loved frogs, so he spent his afternoons
wading in the tall grass, or standing in the leafy water
where the stream turned. Charmed by their stories
of woods and muck, he practiced singing with them
at dusk at pond’s edge, while his mother and father
sat talking, with their cocktails, on the porch. As dark fell
his parent called him, most evenings, for dinner,
but sometimes they let him stay down there until the frogs
were hushed by the cicadas, whose conversations
startled him back to himself. He wandered
up to the house through the tall grass, through the dark,
still singing in his own language. Don’t think of him now,
drinking in a city bar, talking to strangers
who ignore him. Don’t think of him walking out into
the empty street, slightly drunk. He’ll be fine.
Think instead of that walk through the dark wet grass,
the sound of a child’s body moving through the grass;
think instead of those frogs falling silent, of that forest,
of mushrooms that push up overnight like elbows
in the moon-drenched mind of the woods.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
House of Light
 . 
Someone breaks open like a seedpod or a flower
to spill out across the street, and we all keep walking by
because it is too beautiful to notice, or too frightening,
as the river just moves on, the clothed and dreaming river,
the speaking river feeling just the way it needs to, nothing more.
There are feathers in the sky. Say birds, generic things,
or simply ignore them. But what about those other people
bursting into flame? will the singe you? Step away
from those other fires, as though you weren’t wild yourself
in all the parts that matter: in your blood and vivid thinking, seeing
colors for their secrets: how to move and be and feel
until you burst aflame. Some buildings built of stone are made
to echo now and then, forever – no one can escape –
but others made of wood are filled with window after window,
so many windows you could ever open all of them
in a single lifetime. No one lives that long. But you could open some.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2020-06-11a Doughton Park Tree

Read Full Post »

Catch Fire

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on July 7, 2023| 15 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Michael Hettich]
 . 
Core
 . 
The hawk in the white pine shivers, hunched
into itself like a state of being
 . 
we might think had vanished
if we’ve been playing
too long with our gadgets, or making arrangements
to assure our perfect happiness
 . 
sometime in the future. The wind that tossed
cut-down trees
remains a ghost
inside our furniture, like the antique
notion of a soul, and ancient tides
 . 
drew the swirls in the stones that line
our paths. Scars that mark the seasons
 . 
our ancestors lived,
etched like tree rings
into the secrets we don’t even know
we’re keeping; a dream that woke us to forget,
 . 
a blue that dazzles the sky as only
nothing can do, in the morning.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Mom has been put to bed, the nurse’s aide has left, and Dad leans hunched in his favorite blue recliner. As he reads each line of his novel, Dad turns his head left to right, back and forth like a cartoon character eating corn-on-the-cob emptying each successive line of kernels, or precisely the opposite, like a typewriter platen that only returns to its starting point when the line has filled itself. Three lines. Five lines. Now Dad’s eyelids droop, his book droops, and just beyond the pocked and cratered moon of his head the windows of the house across the street catch fire with the dying sun. The orange and smoke of the end of day.
 . 
In a few moments Dad will jerk a bit, open his eyes, and read a few more lines. Some additional span of moments beyond that he will put down the book, heave himself from the chair with a grunt, stagger and catch himself on the wall on the way down the hall to bed. Irrelevant. This moment is the luminous, the sun’s reflection filling the neighbor’s windows before they eclipse and darken. This is the fulcrum moment upon which all prior moments and all moments to come must teeter and balance. Perhaps the three of us present in this old house feel its presence as we breathe in and breathe out, the very quiet house hanging by its fingernails to its own particular very quiet light in this dark whirling night-welcoming time-swallowing universe.
 . 
As I continue to watch, Dad turns his head, a fraction of an arc just barely perceptible, left to right.
 . 
❦
 . 
Core – the first poem in the first section of this new collection by Michael Hettich – is indeed the core and carries me there with it. A state of being. The secret interior liveliness of things, of all things. The ghosts that connect every one of us if we believe their essence.
 . 
I can’t turn the page. I have to return to the first line and begin again. Moments coalesce. I reread images and stanzas in different orders. It is a poem of being and a poem of becoming. I am filled with this one poem and overcome with the awareness of secrets residing in the most mundane things that surround me.
 . 
My son-in-law Josh has constructed a hive, a Ritz Carlton of a hive in my view, and he awaits a swarm. He teaches me about the living organism which is a family of bees. When they sense some ethereal signal, perhaps overcrowding or overly plentiful surroundings, the workers begin the special feeding of a newly hatched larva who will grow into a new queen. The hive cannot have two queens. When the new matures, the old queen takes half the workers and leaves to swarm. If Josh is particularly blessed, if the offerings of beeswax and lemongrass with which he has anointed his hive box are acceptable, the swarm will take up residence and begin making new bees. And new honey.
 . 
The thirty “new” poems in this “new and selected” are themselves such a living organism. They move together through darkness to bring flickering glimpses of light as in dreams. They know there is a core and they seek it. They find wildness in everything and they celebrate it. They are “a sudden glimpse into the silence between thoughts.” All the while the writer, and we readers, too, if we follow, questions the person he was and the person he might become. And in the process of all this seeking and discovery, perhaps each of us may encounter the person we are.
 . 
The Halo of Bees, New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, Michael Hettich. Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023
 . 
…
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Another Kind of Silence
 . 
Sometimes the world grows louder, you realize,
just as the day falls still
and insects whose names you’ll never know
start screaming and laughing, scraping their wings,
then falling silent. It’s as though there were some
 . 
technology that could capture your dreams
and throw them on a screen, to show you to yourself
and confuse you more deeply, you who are not
alone but live in solitude, never
seeing anyone but yourself, even
 . 
when you are talking with your friends and family,
even when you’re moving through a crowd, thinking
 . 
Everything is wild at its core, even
half-asleep evenings in front of the TV,
even listless afternoons shopping
for knickknacks, or food. And food is especially
wild. Just think of all those apples and grains
of rice, just think of that wine
ripening as grapes in the bright sun of some
foreign country, the bees and even
 . 
the bats zig-zagging through the gloaming, singing
as they feast – another kind of silence:
 . 
music your ears are not built to hear,
like the roots of these trees, humming as they soak up
the puddles that have deepened for so many days
you hardly remember how the sunlight feels
on your body, how it makes you squint
and see things differently, the way it makes everything
 . 
waver and shimmer, like a mirage
you walk toward, never arriving.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Dark House 
.  . 
Trust the simple things, she said then, to lead us
through this dark house, hands outstretched to feel
what we can’t see, as we touch a wall,
a table, or a chair we can sit in and wait
for morning. Maybe we’ll talk of small pleasures
 . 
or just listen to each other’s breath. We might seem to see
dreams flicker through our open eyes,
though it needs to be darker, even darker than it is now,
and they only flicker briefly. Don’t be scared.
We can hold hands and listen for our heartbeats, and maybe
 . 
if we can locate a window in the wall,
we can open it and let the outside darkness
rush in with its clarity and wildness; we can sit here
talking of what we imagine must live
out here, waiting for first light – like we are –
 . 
or moving through the dark like the moon does, pulling
the tides inside us, oceans we might even
swim out in, naked and warm, until morning
when we’ll be out of sight, so far from shore
our lives there might go on without us.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
…
 . 
…
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . IMG_7491

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts