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Green Daughters — Diana Pinckney

Posted in Imagery, tagged Diana Pinckney, mermaid, NC Poetry Society, NCPS, poetry, Sam Ragan, Southern writing on March 3, 2012| 4 Comments »

Fort Macon Beach. I’m twelve. Is this dream or memory? Either way it’s true. My little sister snatches from the foam’s edge a clump of stringy green seaweed. Shakes off coquinas and mole crabs. Drapes it on top of her head and down around her shoulders. “I’m a mermaid!”

Of course I believe her. Because what is a mermaid? A creature that rises from a strange and exotic world to challenge all our comfortable assumptions. One who challenges and enthralls only to slip from our grasp. Who breathes a cold hot enfolding incandescent oxygen like no air we’ve been able to imagine.

Any six-year old who will pull ickiness from the surf and adorn herself with it must surely be a mermaid. It explains a lot. My sister who cycled the Eastern Seaboard when she was barely a teenager. My sister more at home in a kayak than a staff meeting (but who can dominate a staff meeting). Who for her forty-first birthday backpacked a hundred miles of the AT with me. Who works her healing power over mind and spirit with Jung and the Buddha at her shoulder. I”ve always suspected it — she does breathe from some atmosphere I’m still trying to discover.

. . . . .

Meet the mermaids of Diana Pinckney’s Green Daughers. Dream or memory, the poems are true. The voice of the watery mother whose daughter is struggling, torn — isn’t it the voice of all mothers? The voice of her daughter tempted by a world out of reach, agonizing for her unknown future — isn’t it the voice of all children? And poems for each one of us — for which of us does not long for deep roots, for a fundament to which we may always return, for sustaining love? Yet don’t we gaze at night into the “sky full / of all her gods and animals” and believe that there is mystery beckoning just beyond our perception?

In the way the next receding wavelet parts the shards to reveal a lettered olive, whole, smooth, its cryptic glyphs revealing a message for my eyes alone, in this way I am still discovering the layers of meaning in Diana’s poems.

. . . . .

What the Mermaid Wishes for her Daughter

I turn to the land and imagine
your long, strong legs kiking a road
I can’t follow, climbing from lavender valleys
to the highest peaks, the whole blue earth
at your feet. And those strange
creatures — men who slipped
like minnows from my grasp —

may you unlock the mysteryof at least one
who listens when you laugh
in your sleep, who cares to chart
a woman’s pleasures and pains. Sailors
have told me love is what
brings the boats home. From where
I sit, nature decides our days
and turns the wheels at night.

I knew you were borrowed, but
you nourished me the way the shore
feeds the sea each day, a glossy
bond unbroken. What you
carry from this place is not
lent, but given.

. . . . .

Diana Pinckney lives in Charlotte, only a few hours drive to the coast when the wind and the traffic are at your back. She teaches poetry at the Cornwall Center. Green Daughters is her fourth collection and is available from Lorimer Press. Get to know Diana and read more of her work at dianapinckney.com.

Diana will be the featured poet at the Sam Ragan Poetry Festival of the NC Poetry Society, March 24, 2012, Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, Southern Pines NC.

. . . . . .

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Yodeling Fungus at Malaprop’s

Posted in Imagery, tagged Dave Manning, humor, Malaprop's Books, poetry on July 4, 2011| 2 Comments »

This is the book I had to write so that I could move on to higher literary endeavors. David Treadway Manning

I came to Malaprop’s Books and Café expecting to be cracked up. Which is to say, I came to listen to Dave read from his latest book, Yodeling Fungus. After the introductory statement above, I knew I would not be disappointed.

I’ve been listening to David Manning read his poetry all across NC for the past ten years, nature poetry, love poetry, spiritual visions, politics, and I am always captivated by his ability to imagine fresh images. He speaks truth from the heart. And then . . . every once in a while he’ll startle me with a poem that is so sly, acerbic and right on downright damn funny I’ll just about strangle. He confesses that these are the result of a genetic misfire from his muse, Guzman:

“Guzman de Pietro is a benevolent demon inhabiting the Manning bloodline for generations as a genetic hitchhiker, imparted into the genome to each its hosts humility and the restorative virtues of Merlot and bathtub naval strategy. A form of male duende, Guzman erupts from time to time in newspapers and poems in outrageous and occasionally embarrassing public behavior.”

. . . . .

Starry Campion

Terminal Issues

Far from faculty teas, and leather elbow-patches,
out in the blue-collar, bare-knuckle world,
out in the cliché-ridden, six-pack world,

the little magazines flash in and out like
virtual particles in the plenteous void. Some
catch and flicker into light to illumine

the pages of Poet’s Market for a year
or two. Names like Manna, Pegasus go up
like bottle-rockets then fall for next week’s

recycle. Somehow Lyn Lifshin strides
their galaxies as if on stepping stones
before they vanish, the tiny journals,

home-grown in someone’s sewing room.
Coastal Plains, Wellspring, Potato Eyes –
I’ve had a poem in the final issue

of each one. I have sent my coup-de-grace
like poisoned arrows into their vitals.
Amelia took my killer limerick then died

(with editor Fred) before the fatal fetal poem
could be born. And Knuckle Merchant greeted
my aggression open-armed then shuddered,

limp into rain-soaked tabloid rags. Now,
I send out poems, with a warning
like a black box label on a drug.

Enclosed are five new poems.
Thanks for you consideration.
The side effect is death.

. . . .

What I should Have Said to the Young Poet Who Asked, “What Is the Typical Age of Your Reading Group Members?”

It’s don’t ask, don’t tell
when we wheel in our IVs
& orderlies. Just come with some poems.
At noon we bring our lunches,

community oxygen & an extra tank
or two. You won’t feel out of place
after we lay a few lines of Thanatopsis
on you with our cool blue hands.

Come visit – you’ll fit right in –
like six by three. We keep out too much
sun, so you can ease back on one
of our satiny pillows & enjoy.

They keep the black van running
outside & Brown-Wynne on speed-dial.
Yesterday a youngster with progeria
came & caught up real fast. Don’t worry,

before you know it you’ll be
one of us. Your hands will clammy up
real fine – knobbly veins and all – and
those cheeks of baby fat will croc-o-dile.

. . . . .

Dave, Worthy Evans and I read as the “Poetrio” at Malaprop’s Books and Café on July 3, 2011.

Yodeling Fungus, Old Mountain Press

Other books by David Manning:
The Flower Sermon
The Ice Carver

Previous GriffinPoetry post Featuring Dave Manning

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Green Revolver at Malaprop’s

Posted in Imagery, tagged Malaprop's Books, poetry, Worthy Evans on July 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

After the reading I’m talking to Worthy Evans, admiring his poems. He says, “I think I have multiple personality disorder.” I say, “Must come in handy.” And doesn’t it though.

Worthy’s new book from University of South Carolina Press, Green Revolver, is populated by a neighborhood, an entire quirky village of personalities. They are on maneuvers waiting on edge for their enemy; staring at incomprehensible instructions on the computer screen in their cubicle; watching an orange-vested family build a sky-scraper; lying in a hospital bed with a puffy head covered with bandages. Whatever they’re doing, it seems serenely commonplace, like you and I could be doing it, too. You and I and Rod Serling.

The poems can be dark, disturbing, or simply quizzical, but hearing Worthy read them they develop into a universe warmly personal. Not just personal in that there’s his own portrait in each, framed by the hole sawed in the wooden barricade at a construction site where passers by can watch the action. And not just the personal history that filters up through the mundane circumstances: soldier, journalist, cubical drone. No, more than that the poems become personal because I the listener/reader am invited right into the mild chaos that accompanies everything we do day to day, if we really think about it. Family life, work, interpersonal politics, it all really is a little strange, isn’t it? I feel much better now. I feel better now that Worthy accompanies me on this strange trip. Hey, we’re all in it together.

. . . . .

Naked-flowering Tick Trefoil

Pre-Op

Dan Jones is coming to meet with us.
All of us, Monday at 2:30 p.m. Dan
Jones will meet with all of us two
days from now. It is all we were
told. Neil Diggs walked up and gave us
the tip, but he didn’t say why Dan
Jones was going to meet with us,
or who Dan Jones is and what
kinds of business Dan Jones was
after. Dan Jones could be a barber, and
for all I know that’s what he is. I looked
down to see what Dan Jones did to me,
the hair on the floor, a drop of blood
smeared onto my pant leg when the clipping
became fierce. I heard opera music and
saw a delicate white hand cross over
cold steel instruments resting on the soft linen.
Tulips grew in the garden outside
the window where Dan Jones, the faculty
and I were meeting to discuss budget cuts.
All of us topping our shaggy manes until Dan Jones
rides by on his penny-farthing to give us a clip.

. . . . .

Never visit Asheville without stopping by Malaprop’s, at the corner of Walnut and Haywood. It is the best independent bookstore on the planet. The cool stuff, the Smoky Mtn. Roasters, the Ashevillians, oh yeah and the books – I could live there. Tell Virginia “Bill says Hi.”

Green Revolver at Malaprop’s Books and Cafe

Charleston City Paper Article about Worthy Evans

Green Revolver at USC Press