V E R S E and I M A G E

+++ for Sam Ragan (December 31, 1915 – May 11, 1996)

How glad I am that my school helped move your hand toward journalism

and poetry and democracy with a little “d.” Cleveland High School:

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,

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

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

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

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

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?

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 . . . .”

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?

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?”

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.

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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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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+++ for Jaki Shelton Green (June 19, 1953 – )

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,

Undo history’s botched economics,

when the mercury’s 103 and there is

more to do with heat than trees.

I stubbed my toe in the room,

to doubt the river branching

blossoms, watery,

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.

Possums wobbled

cobbled swamps,

home of the blue-tailed hare.

Listen, she hears this.

from PRAISES, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, Charlotte, North Carolina. © 2021.

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 . +++ for Fred Chappell (May 28, 1936 – )

++++++++++ I

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.

++++++++++ II

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,

And, lo, Fred came out with three more volumes,

And I was sore surprised the tenor

Of the faces of parents and grandparents,

The children passing by, the cornered bull

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.

++++++++++ III

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

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

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.

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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