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Ephemeral

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Ana Pugatch, Bill Griffin, Engrams, family, Lena Shull Book Contest, nature photography, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, poetry, Redhawk Publications, Seven Years in Asia, Southern writing on January 12, 2024| 6 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Ana Pugatch]

My Mother’s Visit

The woman sensed that I now

looked down on her. That the earth

had turned slowly

into night. That her kin would only be

a distant moon. She watched

shards of light slice through the bamboo

thicket, the stars’ edges harden

and cool. In daytime she marveled

at the strength of a water buffalo, how

it shoulders could shift continents.

But I knew it would never be

enough.

We looked down

from the bamboo raft, and below

the glass surface saw

what flickered in turbid

darkness. Like my mother I thought

of the day when the river

would freeze over –

and how I’d give up everything

to feel its final stillness.

Ana Pugatch

❦ ❦ ❦

Above the river a west-facing ridge, protected, always cool and moist, and a narrow rustic trail that veers from the main — this is the path I take the day after Christmas. Winter brown, mossy stones and lichen, these are all I expect today, but here and there are premonitions. Ruddy toothed leaves, foamflower will bloom in March; bright green variegated heartleaf hides beneath pine needles today but soon will hide its own little brown jugs. So much muted beauty to share, but what is this! Hepatica is blooming!

Right here along this little path is the first place I ever discovered native hepatica in Elkin. (I still clearly remember where I was standing when I added my first bird to my life list decades ago, a chestnut-sided warbler — do normal people hold onto these sorts of memories?) But this is December — the earliest we ever see hepatica in bloom is late February, preceding even the rush of trout lilies. Nevertheless here is one plant with a flower and two swelling buds. Too, too early. Winter too warm. I can’t say I’m filled with happy thoughts for our planet.

A few days later I’m back with a camera. I can’t say I’m filled with happy thoughts of botany and phenology. Last night my brother and sister and I had a lengthy conference about our Mom’s decline. Tomorrow I’ll be sitting down with her and Dad to discuss a palliative care consultation and possibly moving to a higher level of care. I have to watch my footing carefully on parts of this trail – exposed stones, roots, erosion. Going downhill is when you’re most likely to fall. Mom’s descent has been steady for years, gradual, but the path ahead appears much steeper.

This is interesting – a single clump of pinstriped leaves, Adam-and-Eve Orchid. And Cranefly Orchid with its magenta underleaf is plentiful here. When the surrounding trees lose their leaves these orchids make sugar from winter sun. Their own leaves will fade and disappear before spikes of tiny flowers appear mid-summer. Similar for the hepatica: last year’s flecked and nibbled liver-lobed leaves are making way for new green even now. Diminished light, cold and frost, life makes what it can of every season. I bend lower for a better look at each delicate yet resolute little family of leaves. Not a single flower to be found today.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Nightjar

+++ for S.

In the evenings you fold your wings

in a hammock on the porch.

your jaw clicks in imitation

of car locks. Your hair grows dark

to form a nest, twilight clouds:

a puff of throat. Mangrove roots

of a slow entanglement; filaments of stars

hang above us.

Don’t forget you say with the fan-eyes

of your tail as you fly away

each morning. You’re known

to frequent other lives, exhale their smoke,

catch tiny deaths on the temple’s

low wall. You’re known

for your camouflage, the concealment

of thoughts in daylight.

But I’ll still hold you, hoping

you’ll stay. Even if your ones are hollow,

fragile – I know one day you’ll roost

on steady ground.

Ana Pugatch

❦ ❦ ❦

Where does a memory live? Where does its root take hold, where is its safe repository? The sudden intake of breath at one sepia photo slipped from a pile of many others? A brief waft of scent upon opening a long-closed drawer? A word spoken in an unknown language ferrying meaning beyond its meaning? A phrase written in a notebook long misplaced? A dream?

Perhaps our memories are truly embedded in biochemical engrams deep in our hippocampus, hard-wired each in its own bud of synapse, but where is the map to its local address? Ana Pugatch knows to follow the narrow alleys and unmarked streets. Her poems are visions, aromas, sensations that may chill or warm. That may be fearful and unsettling or openly inviting. Her memories weave a world for me. Her world opens me to my own alleys, dim at times but becoming brighter; she opens me to streets I had forgotten. Or have yet to travel.

❦

Is it because the world is so big and there are so many of us in it that we react by closing ourselves and retreating? Are we threatened by the rush and clamor of ideas, practices, cultures? Is that why we draw a line around our tribe and push all others away? We imagine that to survive we must deny, even destroy, everything outside our comfortable patch of expectations. To my mind, humankind’s survival depends on just the opposite. We can’t close the door but most open it. Perhaps we do feel frightened when confronted with anything that challenges our assumptions, whether a person, an artifact, an idea. Perhaps. And perhaps responding to novelty with imagination rather than rebuff is what allowed Homo sapiens to expand while Homo neanderthalensis dwindled and disappeared (except for the handful of Neanderthal genes we’ve acquired and still carry!).

Within poetry is concealed the map to our local memories. And in poetry we encounter shared memory and experience, doorways that may lead us out of our cloister and into the embrace of the different, the foreign, the alien, the frightening. As I read Ana Pugatch’s sensitive and sometimes ephemeral visions of her years in China and Thailand, and now of her presence in North Carolina, I am not an impartial observer watching a travelogue. I connect with those struggles. We are human, she and I and all the people she encounters. From the strangeness I feel a common thread winding around my heart. May that thread continue to pull me forward, and outward.

❦

Engrams, Seven Years in Asia is available from Redhawk Publications.

The Lena Shull Book Award for a full length poetry manuscript is sponsored annually by the North Carolina Poetry Society. Submission period opens June 15, 2024.

❦ ❦ ❦

Unfurnished

I would write down the date if I knew

which day it was.

It’s Tuesday, I think,

and the baby cries upstairs.

I’ve never seen the family;

I only know them by

the red and gold characters posted

on their door.

Their laundry hangs

on the lines above mine;

Cantonese echoes through

my empty rooms.

We share the same view of Zhuhai.

We share that space of sky and trees

and we open our doors

when it rains.

Ana Pugatch

❦ ❦ ❦

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NCPS @ NCMA

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Alan Michael Parker, Bill Griffin, Brockman Campbell Award, Celisa Steele, Felicia van Bork, Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Award, Jim Zola, Joanie McLean, Khalisa Rae, Lena Shull, Nancy Martin-Young, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, North Carolina Museum of Art, poetry, Rhett Iseman Trull, Susan Laughter Meyers on September 29, 2023| 13 Comments »

[with poems by Jim Zola, Rhett Trull, Celisa Steele, Nancy Martin-Young,
Khalisa Rae, Joanie McLean

and a special feature by Felicia van Bork and ampydoo]

Learning to Live

For years I walked out and heard

rustling in the rhododendron

that blooms each spring and paper-mâchés

the patio with white petals.

Yet I’ve never seen wings or nest

or bolt of bird such as one might reason.

Just the flurried sound, a semaphore

of leaves and branch, that could be finch

or swallow, but isn’t.

Not coincidence, I’m convinced,

this signal more subtle than lightning

is grammar for my soul,

an insistence that I must find

a way to live among the small things

with bones like air and hearts

like small sledgehammers.

Jim Zola, winner of the 2023 Lena Shull Book Award of the NC Poetry Society for his manuscript It’s the Unremarkable that Will Last, which will be published by Redhawk Press. Learning to Live originally appeared in Rat’s Ass Review.

❦ ❦ ❦

Night before last Linda opened the final frontier of jigsaws. Galactically difficult, broad swaths of monochromatic nebulae, the merest quantum fluctuation in individual shapes – I fear that to complete this one I may have to boldly go where no one has gone before.

I almost give up before I even finish the border, its infinite deep unvarying black. Be logical here, Bill! I array the pieces by subtle color variation, columns and rows, and turn on all the lamps in the room. Still only cold inhospitable vacuum. Suddenly from the depth of blank stare I discover my fingers picking up pieces and fitting them together, six, then eight, little cellules of life spontaneously generating until logic again reaches in and shuts me down.

Is this how creativity works? A little bit Spock – analyzing patterns and calculating probabilities. A bit more Kirk – impulse, hunch, release to the flow of the subliminal. A prompt, a theme, a roadmap, all good – semper paratus – but I know for myself that the most likely moment for a line to leap up and embrace me is when I’m in free fall in love with a poem I’m reading. Creativity perches just at the periphery longing to show me the piece that will fit, the one I’ve been looking all along.

❦

Felicia van Bork and Alan Michael Parker offer to tickle that little perching creature until you feel its firebreath in your ear. Draw a portrait without looking at the page or lifting your pen. Write five things you would never do and pick the most interesting. The two multi-creatives led The Best Creativity Workshop Ever at NC Poetry Society’s September 16 meeting at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh. Felicia describes her life as a love affair with art. AMP describes his next book as a collection of flash fiction and Bingo cards. And when I asked if they would contribute to this feature on NCPS @ NCMA, I should have expected that they would send something unexpected.

Drawing Exercise No. 30

We come in peace.

We are the Are

Me.

Do not be a

Fraid.

Draw with us.

Together we take up

charcoal

and

Touch

the wall up high

Hi!

high as we can.

We draw down with force.

Use more force.

We step back we step forward.

We connect the vertical lines by drawing

Strong

horizontal strokes

again

Until we have made a fence a wall

To shelter us from the Fraids

Who will not cannot join the Are

Me.

Trace the outline of the person next to you.

Look, that outline is visible through the fence

That is a Fraid.

Now with your eraser erase the Fraid.

It won’t erase yes it smears.

It becomes more present yes the more we erase it.

Now it is inside the fence with us.

All the Fraids are inside with us.

Felicia van Bork @draw_felicia_draw

. Alan Michael Parker @ampydoo

❦ ❦ ❦

Each September the North Carolina Poetry Society meets to feature readings by winners of the year’s most competitive contests. This year for the first time NCPS has held this meeting at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, with a morning of readings, the afternoon workshop, and an open air “pop-up” mic-less open mic hosted by Regina Garcia and Caren Stuart.

The 2023 Lena M. Shull Book Award for an unpublished manuscript from a North Carolina poet (coordinator Sherry Thrasher) goes to Jim Zola for his collection It’s the Unremarkable that Will Last; finalists are Nancy Martin-Young and Joanie McLean. INFO

The Brockman-Campbell Book Contest is for the best volume of poetry published by a native or resident of NC in the previous year (coordinator Preston Martin); the 2023 winner is Joseph Bathanti for Light at the Seam, with finalists Eric Nelson for Horse Not Zebra and Katherine Soniat for Polishing the Glass Storm. INFO

The Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship (coordinator Steve Cushman) provides an honorarium and a week’s residency at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. The 2023 winner is Rhett Iseman Trull of Greensboro, with finalists Khalisa Rae, Celisa Steele, Anne Myles, and RK Fauth. INFO

The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition is sponsored by the North Carolina Writer’s Network coordinated by Terry L. Kennedy. Winning entries are published in storySouth and will be available to read there in the coming months. The 2023 winner is Joshua Martin, with finalists Maria Rouphail and Melinda Thomsen. INFO

This is the first year for the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize, co-sponsored by NCPS and North Carolina Literary Review at East Carolina University (coordinator Devra Thomas). Winners’ videos will be posted online; the 2023 winner is Allan Wolf, with finalists Michael Loderstedt, Onyx Bradley, and Janet Ford. INFO

❦ ❦ ❦

The Stars Align Themselves in Ancient Sisterhoods of Light

And Jade and I sat on the hood of her car

and didn’t mind the rain, the sun

that ticked on anyway, the sun would not go out.

And Megan held my hair back.

And Molly taught me cigarettes. And Sarah

kept her promise not to tell. And Riley told.

And Coach chased me down—night

we lost the playoffs and I’d planned

to kill myself, out the bus emergency door, took off

for the roof downtown—and she carried me to

Brittney’s and Brittney leant me dry clothes, underwear and all,

and let me sleep beside her, in the morning

bought us donuts, even though

I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep.

And sometimes it was as if there were

a party thrown to save me, devout

committees formed, tasked

with just that job. And

sometimes there was no one

but wind off the ocean, the evening

all laid out before me like bedclothes,

and even the gleam in the eye of the wren

and the sunrise all red-dressed and boasting and once

there was this Great Dane, Charlie,

who knew—somehow he knew—

on my lap the full-grown anchor of his body, head

to my shoulder, world I didn’t want

to want to leave.

And Caleb sewed the captain star

I’d ripped from my letter jacket and

kissed me when I needed to be kissed, Bridge

of Sighs and all of Venice incandescent, inviting me

to drown. And kissing didn’t save me. And anything

might save me. And Karen understood.

And Joy did not. And Lauren grew delphinium,

she said, just for me. And Jenny—when the light spiked

sharp and I forgot the way to breathe—

held me for an hour

outside the party, outside everybody else’s ease

and laughter. And Corey found me in the field.

Her hair like smoke and ribbons. We didn’t need

to speak or touch, just watched the sky

until the bats delivered twilight. And Eli

deemed my pain divine and let me see

above his bed where he’d drawn a map of his

in a fever of blue ink after watching Fight Club, and did not

take my clothes off, even though he could.

And Brittney brought me everywhere and Brittney

kept me in her Jeep and Brittney did the talking

when I had no words.

And Nicky gave her lucky coin and Chris

the flannel off his back right after class, right

when I said I loved it. And Janelle at two a.m.,

no hesitation, let me in and shared the Irish whiskey

she’d been saving, lit us candles, until

we were the last, we were sure, awake alive.

And Leah steered us into safety, let me rest

across the back seat, Indigo Girls and yes,

I’m on fire, I’m on fire through the years.

And Jade couldn’t take it anymore

and turned away. And Heather sent an actual

disinvitation, her stationary tinged the palest pink,

but Lizzie patched me up

in the back of the cathedral and kept

her hand on me all night, even in her sleep.

And Holden stayed past visiting hours

and Vanessa, the night nurse, let him. And

under the oak tree, Stephanie

told me all her secrets.

And Brittney came each time I called,

even though her date, even though her finals, even though

I take and take and make myself the center

of each story. And Greta wrote me songs

and Katie said crawl in and

Mary did my portrait as a shadow.

And Adrienne pinned me down,

fiercest hug until I promised

not to jump. I didn’t jump. I didn’t

swallow the whole bottle. I threw out

the razor blade, even though I hid it first awhile

and touched it sometimes like a lover.

I’m lucky. And that’s all. I’m lucky

I am loved.

Rhett Trull, winner of the 2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship. Originally published in Litmosphere 2023 of Charlotte Lit.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Minister of Loneliness

has no children of her own to entrust

to an aproned au pair, no quick kisses

as she leaves each morning for work. And she

has no spouse who might grow melancholy

like temperamental orchids in the vaulted halls

of the silent house, who might open cupboards, search

neat rows of goods for a jar—just one—graced

with his wife’s precise fingerprints. And she has no

friends waiting for her call, no waggling dog

waiting to be fed. No, she was appointed

to this post because she could give everything

to this Ministry, prepared by the paper

she wrote in college—eons ago—on the geology

of loneliness that proves it doesn’t crumble

like sandstone, isn’t fissile as shale. No,

it’s smooth, she showed, and cold as polished

marble. The kind that won’t be carved into the face

of someone beloved. The kind that remains

blank and empty and clean

as counters in a kitchen where no one ever cooks.

Celisa Steele, finalist for the 2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship. Originally appeared in Southern Poetry Review.

❦ ❦ ❦

A Suitable Place

Oakwood Cemetery, Raleigh, North Carolina

I: Pick Up the Wind Phone

First, choose to wander a path with the dead

through the granite gate, past the stone bridge.

There are no signs to point the way.

Scan the landscape until you notice it, study

how it stands, nearly hidden in a hollow

downhill from the Gothic House of Memory:

a spare wooden booth, its rotary phone

discreetly placed for the disconnected.

Lift your hand to hold the heavy receiver.

Take a breath and dial the old exchange—

the one made up of words and numbers,

the one you still remember from a time

long before cell phones and contact lists.

Say hello. Speak their names. Then wait.

Share the news about the house or the baby

or the oak tree that fell in last week’s storm.

Ask forgiveness. Listen for the wind to answer

you, who are left behind, who seek an open line.

II: Scan the Landscape

Deep shade, open lanes, no traffic,

perfect for power-walking past cool stones

and twisted angels or treading up the hill

of Gettysburg dead, mostly Confederates

come home at last, but six who wore blue

unresting, out of place, as I am.

Downhill, a doe browses,

tearing faded roses from a funeral wreath.

Twin headstones pop from too-green grass,

names and birthdates freshly carved,

death dates empty, blank and patient.

Most graves are full, but life lingers

on the landscape’s edges.

While newer graveyards raze markers

to the ground, Oakwood’s monuments tower.

Workers wield weed-whackers daily,

keeping grass at bay. A toy truck,

a mini bottle of Jack—mementos left behind

on plots prove to the living that the dead lived too.

Today only I

stand in the echoing House of Memory

remembering my father, hacking his last.

His ashes kill time in my sister’s hutch.

Would he rest easy here beneath the oaks?

I’m a transplanted Yankee

trying to live long,

but in the end

I think I’d like it here

near these protruding stones

that someone has to rake around.

I’d like to have my daughter trace

my name with her finger, leave

a bottle of Malbec and two glasses.

Nancy Martin-Young, finalist for the 2023 Lena Shull Book Award. This poem first published in Flying South, 2023

.
.

❦ ❦ ❦

. .

Circus Acts: No More Black Girl Magic

Black woman,

This world will make you circus,

freak show, tightrope walker,

contort your name from Saartjie

to “Sara Bartman,”

Hottentot Venus—stage performer.

Look, how they abracadabra the

royal exploitation of your form.

Watch them dissect your broad

bottom saw you into science experiment.

Call your mending—magic

your root balm and salve a work

of the devil–sorcery. Go out the trap

door, come back in the body

of Beyoncé—prized possession,

they will spit-shine the stage for you again.

What a spectacular woman—

two-headed and omnipresent

one foot here, one foot in Houdini-state.

Your magic trick is: “Look at all the wonder

I can do with two hands and twenty-four hours.”

When people say, “That’s Black Girl Magic.”

say, “I have no magic for you. I make meals

from crumbs, cast demons with just

my tongue, envision possibility

from potential.” That makes me

scientist, inventor, chemist—

spiritual being. Tell them this is

not super, this is survival.

When they call you hero,

when they hand you the cape anyway,

ask, “Haven’t I carried enough?”

When they call your strength otherworldly,

say, it is Venus rising

within me, nothing more.

Khalisa Rae, finalist for the 2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship. This poem is from her debut collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Red Hen Press 2021).

. .

❦ ❦ ❦

Into My Field

Pete the old bay horse

called to me this morning

not so that I could hear

but so that I could not look away

he stood apart from the others

as an old horse will

his ribs showed a bit

as an old horse’s will

his russet face

with the white blaze

held so still– arrested while grazing

held my gaze without effort

and his black mane so lush

so thoroughly tossed

gave him a touch of wild

that wild that gathers these days

these fall days – translucent days

days of transubstantiation

all those things

in your hands and your lap

put them away

come into my field

and stay this time

till you are cold and hungry

and even then

stay

Joanie Mclean, finalist for the 2023 Lena Shull Book Award. Her manuscript, Like Wind Into Air, received honorable mention and has been accepted for publication with Redhawk Press.

❦ ❦ ❦

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EDGE – part two

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Beth Copeland, Bill Griffin, imagery, Lavonne Adams, nature photography, NC Poets, NCPS, North Carolina Poetry Society, Pinesong, Southern writing on June 3, 2023| 6 Comments »

[with poems from PINESONG 2023, NC Poetry Society Anthology]

Ghazal: Ghost Apples (Kent County, Michigan)

Ice-encrusted boughs from which transparent versions

of apples hang – each fragile as hand-blown glass.

+++

Their history: fruit on the cusp of rot, winter storm trundling

down a hillside, sleet coating each apple in sudden glass.

+++

Viscous fruit leaked from apertures until only icy shells

remained – December trees bearing quicksilver bulbs of glass.

+++

Imagine them a vivid red or green, like cascades of apples

even humble grocery stores offer on the far side of plate glass.

+++

If we shattered these globes, would they taste like hard cider

or the cloying sweetness of pulp, like edible versions of glass?

++++++

Soon these crystalline shells will melt to nothingness, the way

we all disappear. Beloved, step lightly upon grief’s bitter glass.

+++

Lavonne Adams

Joanna Catherine Scott Award First Place, Pinesong 2023

+++

❦ ❦ ❦

+++

Diversity often blooms at the edge. This little trail heading out from Isaac’s Trail Head on the MST is limn upon limn . . . boundary . . . transition. The wide riparian border along Grassy Creek attracts neotropical migrants for a rest stop each spring; Louisiana Waterthrush, White-Eyed Vireo, and Common Yellowthroat stay behind to breed here. The footpath parallels a pasture fenceline, and while cows with their calves stand flank-deep in meadow grass and blackberry bramble, all manner of wildflowers hug the margin of No Grazing: Blue Toadflax, Venus’s Looking Glass, Carolina Crane’s-Bill. Leaving creekside, the trail is hemmed by a moist rising woodland: Rattlesnake Fern, Sensitive Fern, Southern Lady Fern. And by the end of summer, if the farmer hasn’t sprayed, the trail edges will fill with Blue-Curl, Cardinal Flower, Goldenrod, Wingstem.

+++

Smaller fields and many interruptions make for many edges; diversity begets diversity. At one point along the trail a wide acreage of corn abuts a small hay field of mixed grasses. The corn field is solemn in its solitude; above the hay the air is filled with swallows, Bluebirds and Phoebes perch along the wire, and as we hike past we’re apt to flush an Indigo Bunting foraging.

+++

But then there are Cowbirds. For centuries they followed prairie bison herds and no doubt also the woodland bison of the Carolina piedmont. Now they follow every human disturbance, common in cow pasture but just as common on suburban lawns. Cowbirds are exclusively brood parasites, known to lay their eggs in the nests of over 220 other species. To their detriment. Kirtland’s Warbler has been pushed beyond the edge of “endangered” by Cowbird predation, and most birds do not have the ability to recognize the foreign eggs which will hatch and out-compete the rightful occupants. How to resist? Escape the edges. Reverse the fragmentation. Cowbirds will not follow into deep woods – warblers nesting deep in the forest are safe.

+++

It isn’t the Cowbird that threatens wood warblers, whip-poor-wills, vireos. It is shrinking habitat. Many species thrive at the edge. Some, though, require wide wild expanses. How much wild can we leave?

+++

❦

+++

Upon which side of the boundary does poetry perch, thrive or decline? And what would it look like, that restored, invigorated poetry habitat, a definite nudge toward thriving? More fifth graders setting pen to page and seeing their lines is print, as they have in this year’s annual Pinesong anthology by the North Carolina Poetry Society? More opportunities and promptings to write – whatever one’s background, training, preferred theme, chosen form? And more readers?

+++

That’s where we come in. This morning I broke a nice sweat hiking miles along meadow and creek, through upland forest to lakeshore and back. This afternoon with feet up I’ve covered another rewarding meander through the pages of Pinesong. Student poets, grades 4 through undergrad; dozens more of adult poets, many names entirely new to me. I’ve traveled new places, I’ve encountered the unexpected and enlightening, I’ve paused long to reflect, and I’ve even laughed out loud. As Robert Frost wrote in The Pasture: “You come, too.”

+++

❦ ❦ ❦

+++

Eleven Lines In Search of the Perfect Rhyme

+++

Is it accidental that bereft almost rhymes with death?

+++

Watching geese rise in a chevron formation The New River

at Grassy Creek, flying south to warmer waters, I think of how

+++

sons and daughters grow up, how the nest – that like death

almost rhymes with bereft, – empties with their flight.

+++

How these words fly out of my mouth like startled birds.

+++

How we dream of loved ones who are dead. How we forget

what happened in the dream, what we did, what we said.

+++

How there are hundreds of ways to leave, not only the 50 ways

in Paul Simon’s song, and thousands of ways to grieve, bereft.

+++

How you can both the lover leaving and the lover left.

+++

Beth Copeland

Carol Bessent Hayman Poetry of Love Award Honorable Mention, Pinesong 2023

+++

❦ ❦ ❦

+++

Pinesong is the annual publication of contest winning poems by the North Carolina Poetry Society, founded in 1932. Pinesong 2023 is Number 59, edited by Sherry Pedersen-Thrasher with assistance from Joan Barasovska. This year’s volume is dedicated to David Radavich, former NCPS President and steadfast supporter of poetry and the arts.

+++

You can learn more about North Carolina Poetry Society and its contests, plus read previous years’ editions of Pinesong . . . here.

+++

If you would like to purchase Pinesong ($12, postage included) please contact NCPS Vice President of Membership Joan Barasovska: msjoan9[at]gmail[dot]com

+++

A free issue of Pinesong is available to all NCPS members in good standing who request ($2 mailing expense). Please contact Joan, as above.