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Posts Tagged ‘Sam Ragan’

Sidling into April – 2012

Posted in Imagery, tagged Barton College, Debra Kaufman, imagery, poetry, Sam Ragan, seasonal imagery, Southern writing on April 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I don’t know anything. I’ve got a lot of people fooled into thinking I do, but no, I don’t know anything.

Sometimes Linda accuses me of thinking I know everything. Well, OK, maybe I do tend to blurt out answers. I hope I’m not as obnoxious as Bill Murray watching Jeopardy in Groundhog Day, but I do suffer from a mild case of expository blatheromania. “What is a stereoisomer?” “How about a four letter word for ‘wing-like’?” Linda won’t let me within fifteen feet of her when she’s working a crossword. But all this fact stuff is just trivial. I has nothing to do with knowing. I say things out loud to test myself, to see if I finally do know anything.

Nope, still don’t.

All of which is making me very nervous about being the featured reader (along with Debra Kaufman) at Walking into April this Saturday. [April 14, Barton College, 9:00 a.m., Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center – be there and place your bets as to whether I know anything.] It’s not the reading part. I love to read and recite – my poetry, classic poems, a Sam Ragan or two – I’m a big ham. No, it’s the little entry on the day’s schedule at 11:00 that says “Roundtable Discussion with Griffin and Kaufman, who will present their tips on writing and reading poetry.”

Right now the anything I don’t know the most about is poetry. As in a total mistrust of whatever I possess that passes for taste, opinion, judgement, skill. I worry that at the very moment I begin to like a certain poem that proves that it’s inferior. “Man, you don’t know anything about GOOD poetry.” And those poems that appear to me as if they were compiled by a random phrase generator? “What is the matter with you, man? Where’s your head?” Maybe it’s just lack of self-confidence. Maybe it would help to beg an audience with the Wizard of Oz, who would tell me, “Nonsense, lad! You imagine you have no poetic soul, but all you need is this . . . [fill in the blank: MFA; Fellowship; Pushcart; One thousandth ‘like’ on WordPress].”

There’s only one cure. Read some more poems. Let myself get caught up in images that seem to float effortlessly from line to line like dragonflies laying eggs on the mirror of a pond. Words never before juxtaposed that now seem as if they were meant to be married since the genesis of language. A narrative so exotic and at once so universal that I suddenly realize it’s my own story this strophe has captured.

Maybe I’ll discover I don’t need to know anything.

. . . . .

Now Debra Kaufman knows something. I have sat in her presence. As she shares, the lines wind and flow like silk ribbon that seems so casual but soon binds you with no escape. Her poems may hint at a personal history at the same time they are invoking an entirely new and fantastic landscape. I walk into that landscape, look around, and find myself at home.

I am counting on you, Debra. Knowing you’ll be there on Saturday, I will stand up straight, put off all this sidling nonsense, and walk upright into April.

. . . . .

Autumnal Equinox

Sugar maples blaze at sunset;
leaves swoop and skirt
the chilling wind like chimney swifts.

A boy leaps into leaves,
calls to a neighbor’s Irish red,
as light falls, a cat’s white shadow,

on his grandmother’s lap.
Her hands rest there,
her grandmother’s hands,

the same boniness of wrist and knuckle,
dry fingers nearly flammable in the smoky air.
She smells ripe pears

and feels her body drawn
toward the darkness that rolls in
earlier each day.

Heat and light retreat,
and evening covers everything
except the boy, whose hair shines

silky silver light
as he tosses armfuls of color
upward, like sparks.

from The Next Moment (Jacar Press)

. . . . .

Debra Kaufman is a North Carolina poet, playwright, and educator. The Next Moment is her most recent poetry collection. Her short and full-length plays have been performed throughout North Carolina and elsewhere. Debra is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council playwriting scholarship and of a grant from the Central Piedmont Regional Artists Hub Program.

Sample her work at:

Debra Kaufman homepage

Kathryn Stripling Byer — Here Where I Am (blog)

Scott Owen’s Musings

Moon-Mirror-Whiskey-Wind

. . . . .

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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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Walking into April

Posted in Imagery, tagged Barton College, GCDPS, poetry, Sam Ragan, seasonal imagery on April 10, 2011| 1 Comment »

Writing a poem is an act of discovery. The poem discovers itself. – – – Sam Ragan

Down East poetry fans celebrate every spring with a walk into April – an all day poetry event at the Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center (Barton College, Wilson, NC). To open the festivities on Aril 9, I had the honor of reciting this poem by Sam:

The Marked and Unmarked

I cannot say upon which luminous evening
I shall go out beyond the stars,
To windless spaces and unmarked time,
Turning nights to days and days to nights.

            This is the place where I live.
            I planted this tree.
            I watched it grow.
            The leaves fall and I scuff them with my feet.
            This is the street on which I walk.
            I have walked it many times.
            Sometimes it seems there are echoes of my
                                 walking-

In the mornings, in the nights,
In those long evenings of silence and stars

-the unmarked stars.

[Sam Ragan, from To the Water’s Edge, Moore Publishing Company, 1971]

In 1982 Governor Jim Hunt appointed Sam Ragan North Carolina Poet Laureate for Life. This small fact doesn’t begin to express Sam’s immense influence on NC arts and letters in the second half of the twentieth century. Read his bio for the accomplishments, publications, and “firsts,” but for those who new Sam Ragan as well as we hundreds and thousands who know of him, he embodies the love of poetry and the love our state – place, people, and persnickitiness. Oh yes, and the affirmation that bow ties are cool.

About now Sam might well be saying, “Enough! Back to the poetry.” Back to Barton College. For the morning session Peter Makuck and Sara Claytor read alternately; they took turns reading a poem or two trying to forge a thematic link to the poems that preceded. [My next few posts will include some of their poetry.] They then led a roundtable on the craft of poetry. Very energizing. The afternoon session each year is the Eastern Region readings by the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet (this year John Hoppenthaler) and the four students for whom he has served as mentor over the past several months. [More about that later, too].

I’d like to think that all the poetry events, celebrations, publications and edifices that carry the name “Sam Ragan” would be satisfactory to the man, the legendary. But why is the event called, “Walking into April?” Sam’s poems were sensual and often deeply colored by North Carolina native creatures, flora, seasons. The scent of lilac, a cool night breeze, whatever changes and never changes. His poems are often deceptively simple, like the one above, but as I labored to memorize those lines they began to live in me more and more deeply. From Sam Ragan’s 1986 collection comes this:

Let Us Walk into April

It was a pear tree in bloom
That lit up your eyes.
You came at blossom time –
Dogwoods and lilacs,
The camellia and azalea,
And the glow of the redbud tree –
Thousands of wildflowers run before your feet,
And a faint green hovers in the woods.
Here we are just before the coming of April,
When the whole world is new
And each day is a beginning,
A time of sunlight and spendor –
Come, let us walk into April.