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[with poems from Shelby Stephenson’s PRAISES]
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The World Leads Us to the Arts and Back
+++ for Sam Ragan (December 31, 1915 – May 11, 1996)
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How glad I am that my school helped move your hand toward journalism
and poetry and democracy with a little “d.” Cleveland High School:
This land of ours if full of schools, schools both great and
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small; when it comes to praising them, why my school beats them all.
I’m proud you graduated from my Johnston County alma mater. I’m
sorry your family lost the farm in Granville, around Berea, Shake Rag,
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Stem. You came to Bailey’s Crossroads, lived near Ebenezer Church,
among the Ogburns; your love of words showered acres, snuffling the
burning crosses. Hope was your story, lyric, svelte. Poverty? You
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wrote in “That Summer”: “a wild turkey flew out of the woods / And
even if it was out of season, He fed a family for two days. / And it was
better than that mud turtle / That looked like mud and tasted
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like mud.” I loved to walk into your office piled high with papers.
You’d peer over them, rise, jingle some change in your pocket and say,
“Well, what do you know?” “On a scale of one to five, Sam, about
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minus two,” I’d say. Your vacations you took in your office, mostly.
Sunday mornings? When I’d drive by, I’d see your Buick parked beside
The Pilot.
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Shelby Stephenson
from PRAISES, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, Charlotte, North Carolina. © 2021.
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Can a poem which is simply a list mean anything? Can a list of place names – counties and towns and neighborhoods and destinations – catch in the throat and widen the eyes? What are all these words if not the name someone has found for home?
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Canton, Carolina, Carrollton, Carpinteria, Cary, Chapel Hill,
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Driving south from Ohio, we exit I-77 at Pearisburg (the four-lane still under construction up the escarpment), careen switchbacks from Fancy Gap to Mount Airy, then cross the state line into North Carolina: at their first glimpse of Pilot Mountain, my parents break out in unison every time, “Here’s to the Land of the Longleaf Pine, a summer land where the sun doth shine . . . .”
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Cleveland, Columbia, Dan, Dauphin, Durham, Edenton,
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But I wasn’t born here. I didn’t grow up here. A couple of summer weeks in Morehead with Nana, Bogue Sound funk and fig preserves; in Hamlet, the iron bed in the back bedroom with Grandaddy’s snores, his Old Spice and gun oil; a swing past the house on Runymede near Old Salem where Mom grew up – phantoms, atavisms, only glimpses and dreams, none of them really my home. So why do the names in Shelby Stephenson’s
Precedence, the introductory poem in his book
PRAISES, why do they have the power to squeeze my heart?
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Hamlet, Harnett, Highlands, Hillsborough, Huntersville,
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Five days after we married Linda and I moved to Durham: June 20, 1974. That’s hot breath on the neck of fifty years in North Carolina and Lord how I have wanted to call this place my home! The generations of Griffins plowing fields in Union County, can they bring me home? Great-grandmother Griffin holding me on her knee in that old photo in Mt. Gilead above the dam, can she? Two kids born in Durham County General, two grandkids at Hugh Chatham in Elkin, surely they must be able. There must be something that can heal me of the apprehension that in any conversation someone may at any moment accuse, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
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Nashville, New Bern, New Hope, Neuse, Northampton, North Wilkesboro
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This book of Shelby’s has come as close as anything. His long and careful listing A to Z – I read and recall all the clay and sand and sod Linda and I have trod. That summer we lived in Clinton and she learned to drive. The sweet corn from his garden Dr. Murphy bestowed when I externed with him in Hillsborough. Two little kids with us on those rotations in Fayetteville, Goldsboro, Mt. Olive. Every detail of all the lighthouses climbed, of Tryon Palace, of the Town Creek Mounds, of our little patch of Blue Ridge. Hiking the state parks and greenways and nature trails in all seasons and all weathers, even Nags Head Woods in February and Roanoke Sound beginning to freeze. Years and changes and the earth moving beneath our feet.
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Wake Forest, Waxhaw, Weaverville, Weymouth, Winston-Salem
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Dang, I guess we are from around here. Thank you, Shelby, you who still live on Paul’s Hill in the house where you were born, thank you for opening the door that invites us all inside to discover that we’re home.
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❦
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After that one prefatory poem, each page of Shelby Stephenson’s
PRAISES is just that – praise and homage for those who have created literature and art in North Carolina for 300 years. He begins with John Lawson (b. 1674) and George Moses Horton (b. ~1798) and ends a hundred pages later with Jill McCorkle (b. 1958) and Randall Kenan (b. 1963). Many of the poems are rooted in anecdote and personal friendship but they reach into the heart of everything that makes the writing vital. Perhaps there is no North Carolinian past or present who could have created such a treasure. As Ron Smith writes on the cover, “Shelby Stephenson does not offer lyric effusion in a neutral space; he demonstrates that Emerson’s “the mind of the Past” is best encountered through the generous sensibility of a grounded poet. . . . This volume should be in every collection devoted to Southern Studies.”
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. . . Every form grows beauty
and impermanence, layers of voices, precise as one head, hand, face,
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page, pen.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Making Words Breathe Conscience
+++ for Jaki Shelton Green (June 19, 1953 – )
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One day I went to her poetry reading.
I stole tones and breaths of her poet’s song.
I could hear Billie Holliday singing “Strange Fruit.”
I wanted to ask for mercy,
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Undo history’s botched economics,
when the mercury’s 103 and there is
more to do with heat than trees.
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I stubbed my toe in the room,
to doubt the river branching
blossoms, watery,
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in Efland
running
with wild deer and rabbits,
Carolina wrens turning
oceans to hope,
a thing with hymns
and children whiling
desire, their shoes digging
ruts a flagpole schools.
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Possums wobbled
cobbled swamps,
home of the blue-tailed hare.
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Listen, she hears this.
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Shelby Stephenson
from PRAISES, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, Charlotte, North Carolina. © 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Looking for the Apple Tree
. +++ for Fred Chappell (May 28, 1936 – )
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+++ HIS NAME that was ever used was Stovebolt Johnson and he was a short
+++ black man, heavily muscled, a chunk of a man.” (The opening sentence in
+++ the story “Blue Dive” in Moments of Light)
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++++++++++ I
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He loves to salute with a drink
And raise a wrinkling thumb
Towards intellection, think,
I mean, then throw all thought to some
Seeming lore a shortstop
Might snag, talking up baseball.
He can carry on about a hog-box
And make you see the hog, a Farmall
In the mix, and Pope, too,
Alexander, I mean: never would he
Name a poem for any part of the pope, though.
His work’s morality plays the wee
Canton, his stomping ground, though he left
It here and there,
For occasional sightings as allegory.
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++++++++++ II
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I’ve seen Lee Jones ride a bucket down
To clean out our lot-well
And to retrieve my mother’s doggie, brownie.
I read River to a bunch of students
Once and they sprouted shoots and shouts
When I danced in front of them,
Letting Virgil Campbell swear he could
Shoot the god-raging Pigeon swurging
In his pants, the yard, the rose
Garden gate, open, debris watering fast
Familiar voices gushing from a cathedral funeral,
Yet common as a mule drinking water from a trough,
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And, lo, Fred came out with three more volumes,
Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, Earthsleep,
And I was sore surprised the tenor
Of the faces of parents and grandparents,
The children passing by, the cornered bull
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In the pasture, all lounged animals and human flesh
In lineages for miles to keep away
The drinking Virgil put into words,
The fish slapping and sliding for lures
Snagging murmurs of drifting glasses
Shot-filled and choked with gregarious whiffs
Undoing his own talking.
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++++++++++ III
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In prose, essays, fiction,
Short stories, forms diction,
Multi-told tales along
Side villanelles, sestinas, you name it, Infinity, Plus One,
The scattered debris of chewed billy goat wads,
the cuds of cows on the Blue Ridge, the lows
Murmuring indolence dependent
On freedom he lends
To every piece, hails,
Then takes on the world again and nails
A greeting the page spans – he makes me laugh right out and smile
Aslant at rhythms working syllables mile by mile
Until haints themselves
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wallow down beside me, as if to say,
Goodnight, Somewhere, there’s a beyond
The world’s engine dawdles:
The raised fist for freedom
Shines humor for consolation;
Wanting not to be bored, the Muse of Music
Surprises him with more news,
A book of verse, collection of stories, another novel.
Universes, constellations, – lower
Shoals for minnows fanning
Swirling apple blossoms bedding
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Shelby Stephenson
from PRAISES, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, Charlotte, North Carolina. © 2021.
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Shelby Stephenson earned many awards for teaching during his long tenure at UNC Pembroke, where he also edited
Pembroke Magazine and raised it to national prominence. He served as Poet Laureate of North Carolina 2015-2018. Recent books:
Possum (Bright Hill Press), winner of Brockman-Campbell Award;
Elegies for Small Game (Press 53), winner of Roanoke-Chowan Award;
Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl (Bellday Books), the Bellday Prize;
Paul’s Hill: Homage to Whitman (Sir Walter Press); Our World (Press 53);
Fiddledeedee (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press; reprinted by Press 53);
Nin’s Poem (St. Andrews University Press);
Slavery and Freedom on Paul’s Hill (Press 53);
Shelby’s Lady: The Hog Poems (Fernwood Press). He lives at the homeplace on Paul’s Hill, where he was born.
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Author Clyde Edgerton says of Shelby: “He writes poems that skin raccoons, sweeten the pot-likker, shine through the window, and sing like a gold and silver bird. I’m lucky to know the boy.”
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