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Posts Tagged ‘Southern writing’

Lean In

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 31, 2024| 12 Comments »

 . 
[with 4 poems by Lou Lipsitz]
 . 
Blackberry Authority
 . 
When I first came out to the country
+++ I knew nothing. I watched
as people planted, harvested, picked
+++ the berries, explained
the weather, tended the ducks and horses.
 . 
When I first came out to the country
+++ my mind emptied and I
liked it that way. My mind was like a sky
+++ without clouds, a summer sky
with several birds flapping across a field
+++ on the eastern horizon.
 . 
I like the slowness of things, the empty
+++ town, the lake stillness,
the man I met who seemed contented, who
+++ sat and talked in the dusk
about why he had chosen this long ago.
 . 
I did better dreaming then, the colors
+++ were clear. I found something
important in myself: capacity for renewal.
+++ And at night, the sky so intense.
Clear incredible stars! Almost another earth.
 . 
But now I see there are judgements here.
+++ This way of planting or that.
The arguments about fertilizers and organics:
+++ problems of time, figuring how
to allocate what we have. So many matters
+++ to fasten on and dissect.
 . 
That’s the way it is with revelations.
+++ If you live it out, your start
thinking, examining. The mind cries out
+++ for materials to play with.
Right now, in fact, I’m excited about
+++ several new vines and waiting
for the blackberry authorities to arrive.
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
This green chasm, engulfing trees and vines – this is four lane 421 west of Winston-Salem, not the Appalachian Trail. Last summer was all orange barrels, lane closures, men in trucks extending long booms with wicked whirling steel teeth. Dragon-necked cretaceous devourers, no gentle arborist in sight, slashing open the Yadkin Valley bar sinister for twenty miles.
 . 
Then winter, splintered, broken and bare. Grey horizontal walls sixty feet high along the roadway. Conquered, blasted, subdued.
 . 
Until spring. Sunlight, warming earth, the gathering retaliation of cambium and rising sap. This May impenetrable green fills every chink, lines the cowering freeway, and reaches into the light. Untouched leafy crowns look down on us as we speed past. The canopy crowds the sky. Every shade of jade, kelly, forest fills our periphery through the windshield . If our machines and our hubris withdrew for a year or two, would Kingdom Plantae march in and obliterate all traces of our presence?
 . 
I feel the King’s green pressure leaning in.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Evening
 . 
The poet’s test
is to write a poem
called “evening”
beginning in the small street
near the bay
where they are selling clams.
 . 
There must be a woman
he is pursuing
in his own distracted way
– someone he has sought
for years
and can almost catch.
 . 
There must be a fire
somewhere
in the darkening sun for example
or in a room
where logs are flaming
and the poet
must hold back and wait
until he knows
exactly what not to say.
 . 
Then, when he opens his lips,
the moon will
come out of his mouth.
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In the book store, across the room, before the poetry reading begins, I glimpse a man I haven’t seen in twenty years. It was at another poetry meeting. We spoke for just a few minutes and I bought his book. I know exactly where that book is today, in one of the piles on my desk, waiting for me to open it and let it speak to me again. When I get home I will.
 . 
A poem may capture a moment or span a lifetime. It may tell a story or simply evoke a gut response. Perhaps the poem is historical, explicitly tethered to a date and place. Or perhaps, as Lou Lipsitz writes in Evening, the poet / must hold back and wait / until he knows / exactly what not to say.
 . 
Read Walt Whitman, writing 150 years ago – the distance in time and space is no real impediment to you lying with him in a field of grass. The lines weave into you and wrap you into their reality, becoming your reality, remaining theirs. But now read poems written 30 years ago by a man pictured in his 40’s on the book jacket whom you’ve just seen in the flesh in his 70’s. Reality is more complicated. The longing and conflict in those lines, do they still reside in that person who wrote them? Is it even fair to ask? Does it matter at all in the moment of reading, in the reflection afterwards?
 . 
Lou Lipsitz’s Seeking the Hook is deeply personal, painful and contemplative, self-accusatory and redeeming. Reading the poems then and reading the poems now jars me to ask how I myself have changed in those twenty or thirty years. I share those accusations; I seek the same redemption. The reality I discover in these poems touches me in new ways, perhaps more confusing but perhaps also more familiar. Personal. I want to tell Lou this, but when the reading has concluded I turn and he is gone.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Song of the Divorced Father
 . 
“. . . I realized that it’s inevitable; wounds are part
of what parent give their children.”
++++++++++++++ Michael Meade
 . 
There was a woman poet from Chile who
wrote “sleep close to me” to her small son.
Reading that, I think of you, children, no
so long and substantial, no beyond
my picking up and carrying to bed, now
beyond the reach almost of my arms and my soul.
 . 
I remember the night silence and my father-ear
listening for your breathing; the cries and
choking sound that pulled me from sleep.
I remember the early mornings of sentimental
thoughts as I watched your faces utterly
asleep, and then strange dreams you told
of wolves and weddings and curious caves
full of treasure.
 . 
Now I want you to sleep near me, to be
in the house with me, so we can sing together
sometimes, so I can relearn your new voices.
So we can carry the wounds together,
pulling them from the sea, an old boat
we used to fish in –
+++ turn it upsidedown and let the flaking
+++ paint dry in the sun – then when night comes
+++ we can howl and weep – you can hammer me
+++ with you small fists of long ago and we can
+++ hack the boat apart and burn it;
+++ it will burn all night, the stars wheeling above us
+++ as we lie there, separate, exhausted.
 . 
Then in the morning, the boat will be intact,
awaiting us, the blue paint fresh. I will say:
“let’s get some fish in the marshes.” And you
will steer, knowing the way all over again.
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A Task
 . 
+++ — reply to Auden & the intellectuals
 . 
Potatoes. I will hunt potatoes
in the fashion of my grandmother
who fed us all.
 . 
Potatoes. Like the tough hearts of young men.
The core of dark joy in sexual love.
The world that trembles and changes.
 . 
In the fashion of my grandmother
I will abandon all exotic things
 . 
and hunt a language
of odd, true shapes the were nurtured in the old earth
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Biography and other works by Lou Lipsitz HERE
 . 
Selected poems by Lou Lipsitz in THE SUN
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 

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First Human

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2024| 15 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Rick Campbell]
 . 
The Light We Call Winter
 . 
If you see me walking down
the shell road under myrtle
 . 
and Spanish moss, don’t worry.
The road’s a circle and it brings me
 . 
back to my yellow mailbox.
You might give me the name
 . 
of the bird that sat all morning
on the thin branch.
 . 
Give me the last lost months gone
in a haze, sloughed off like an old dog
 . 
shakes himself dry.
Walk with me.
 . 
I won’t say
I don’t need you.
 . 
Rick Campbell
from Fish Streets Before Dawn, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
When the first Human woke up on their first morning on Mother Earth, they discovered all the other persons watching them. The Plant persons, the Animal persons, the Lichen and Fungus persons, all of them had already been living together on Mother Earth for a very long time and they knew how to get along. Now here was this new member of the family, this Human. No doubt everyone was asking themselves whether this new person would also learn how to get along.
 . 
The Human opened their eyes and the first thing they said was, “How did I get here?” A question Humans would spend a very, very long time trying to answer. Then the Human stood up, looked all around, and asked, “What am I doing here?!”
 . 
At this point the Creator of Mother Earth and Every Living Thing smiled. Yep, those are the right questions. Two of the big ones. And don’t forget the third, maybe even bigger and maybe even more important. The Human noticed all the persons watching – Plant, Animal, Fungus, all of them – and asked, “Who are you?” The Creator smiled even wider. Yep!
 . 
❦
 . 
A nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass for inspiring this little parable. And a nod to Rick Campbell for poking at all the questions until they wake up and try to swim to the surface. The answers you’re going to get in this life depend on the questions you ask.
 . 
Be sure to ask, really, the questions no one knows the answers to. I almost wrote “the questions no one knows how to ask,” but how is something you certainly do know. The more you pay attention, the more you wonder, the more you know how to ask those questions. Not ask like Rodin’s Thinker with your chin on your fist in placid contemplation. More like lying awake at 4 a.m. in a sweat and doubting but asking anyway whether there’s any reasonable hope for you, you Human.
 . 
What am I doing here? I haven’t needed an answer as long as I’ve been always doing, doing. In fact I don’t even know there’s a question until I stop. (Maybe Rodin’s silent seated ponderer is an apt image after all.) In that momentary pause, in that engulfing silence, the questions suddenly loom huge and overwhelming. Why am I? What is my purpose? And cold, dark nothing threatens to bring its answer.
 . 
But then I look around. Who are all these others? All these persons, Human and not, sharing this circle with me? Can we get along? May I know them? It’s never too late to ask. Never too late to try.
 , 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Practicing Silence
 . 
Outside of NYC, it’s
almost impossible
to be mistaken
 . 
for a mime. Here,
at the edge of the country
I’m just a guy who moves
 . 
silently down crushed shell
roads, through pine forests
in deep sand, past the harbor’s
 . 
broken docks. Ok, yes,
I could talk more, but to whom,
the clerk at the Dollar General?
 . 
What would I find worth saying
more than thanks? Buzzards whirl
over my head like synchronized swimmers.
 . 
Rick Campbell
from Fish Streets Before Dawn, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Frank X. Gaspar writes this in the introduction to Fish Streets Before Dawn: In the poem Throwing Starfish Back into the Sea [Rick] wonders how much “good he has done” with his uncertain act of kindness. It is an apt poem, and taken in the context of this collection and its outcries, we see that Rick Campbell’s wanderings and questing are testimony to the core of his art: surviving, yes, but surviving as the step that allows us to pursue any small good we can bring along with us.
 . 
Rick Campbell lives in Alligator Point, Florida, and teaches in the University of Nevada-Reno’s MFA program. He has published seven earlier poetry collections, plus a collection of essays, Sometimes the Light. His most recent poetry collection, Fish Street Before Dawn, from Press 53 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is available HERE
 . 
 , 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Xenoglossy
 . 
I once wrote of my mill town
that you can want all your life here.
I was in love with words and
the directions they might lead:
into the temple of furnace fire
and out again? Along
a ridge with hawks drafting
thermals? Blues as it’s bent
at the crossroads? Freight trains
clacking downriver under the cloaked moon?
Just empty space?
 . 
At night I speak in the tongues
of angels and fools: babble
imperfect definitions of desiderate, lack,
+++++++++++++++++++ ought.
 . 
Yesterday, blades of grass parted
as the pygmy rattler sidled away
from my boot. I wanted to call
the hawk in the pine tree
down to snatch it up, but
I had no tongue for hawk.
 . 
What did I know? I am older.
It wasn’t just home that wanted,
not just the valley that lacked.
 . 
Rick Campbell
from Fish Streets Before Dawn, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree

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Discover

Posted in Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2024| 3 Comments »

IMG_9629, flower
. .
[with two prose poems by Mark Cox]
. .
Poem at Forty I Could Not Finish Until I Turned Sixty
. .
The seas below our house pitch deep and soundless. Like sweat engrained in handrails, or the oil darkened edges of our dining room table, every shadow implies more shadow.
. .
Late summer has quieted the cicadas, damped their dwindling number with the lastness of their deaths. There is a chill to the air, no wind at all. My youngest son is twenty days old, feeble, burrowing in and out of awareness, still unsure his body isn’t trying to kill him. He cries to eat, he cries to sleep, he cries as his tiny gut rejects what all must go to waste.
. .
Last week, scientists discovered the bones of a humanoid who fell into a well shaft three million years ago. His wife said he’d turn up! That the world has no pity for the individual life, this is no secret to anyone, yet we just can’t get over it. I am here in the middle of a bed, in the middle of the night, in the middle of my life, my son nestled as if he were my own bones, as if we’ve both toppled forty years down into positions we’ll retain forever. There is no chiropractor for the soul.
. .
The museum of loss has at last opened its doors to me. Scholars cannot agree, the docents say, but almost certainly arms encircling the body was an omen of intimacy. Little is known of the fabled kiss; what remains of crude glyphs and mosaic shards indicate our elders once believed that souls were exchanged. One cannot, of course, touch anything in the museum of oss. One can only view what was once there. Nothing can be imagined and remain the same.
. .
Just what does this portend? There will always be a thermos next to the detonator, a pair of reading glasses weighting the sentence handed down without mercy. An airman in WWII, John Ciardi recounted how once from the blister all gunners sat in, he watched the bomber beside him burning. His counterpart waved up as that other plane went down.
. .
Each age has its designated bandwidth. Without warning, my son is twenty and in love. We are belted in. Splitting space. In his lap, he holds one hand with another, as if to keep its fingers from detaching, as if I’d helped him hurry to the car, and was driving to a hospital. I want my tree back the way it was, he whined, one autumn morning. He was four or so and knew even then what he’s now not able to share.
. .
Much is felt that resists being known. If there are seven billion human beings on earth, then every day is 19 million years of experience, just all at once. Somehow, I find this comforting, though by now you’d think we’d know what we are doing.
. .
Mark Cox
from Knowing, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
. .
. .
❦ ❦ ❦
. .
Better to resist the flux and believe that something stays. At last, he thinks, that is his answer. How still it all is, so utterly clear. Then one bright leaf lets go and changes everything.
++++++Knowing, Mark Cox
. .
It all begins with a question. No, that comes second, first there’s noticing, and noticing that something is different. Wait, even before the noticing there has to be paying attention. No, no, it all begins with this: just being there, moving through the world, part of all the changes.
. .
Joe just texted Cynthia and me a remarkable photo taken along a path we’ve walked together more than a few times. Looks like Bloodroot – nothing else has those freaky leaves emerging from the earth like fingers of the undead – but the petals are different. Instead of a circle of daisy-like petals (radial symmetry) they are bunched and doubled. And the center is almost naked as a belly button.
. .
A hybrid, we ask ourselves? But there are no other species in genus Sanguinaria with which to hybridize. A mutant, then. Sure enough, we discover online images of Bloodroot Multiplex with these peony-like blossoms, all of them propagated from a spontaneous mutation first discovered in Ohio years ago. Sterile flowers in which the stamens have reverted to petals. Evolution amok. Now we have the same mutation here in our backyard.
. .
❦
. .
Plants that make flowers first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago. Their flowers left the seeds exposed – they were naked (gymnosperms = conifers and gingko). Gymnosperms ruled for over 200 million years until the first flowering plants evolved forms that keep their seeds enclosed. But the outcome of the mutations that eventually resulted in plants with such protected seeds, angiosperms, was so successful that they have filled the earth with their variety and diversity. Every plant you see with flowers blooming this spring is an angiosperm (and even a lot whose flowers you don’t see, like grass for goodness sake).
. .
The enclosing ovary which cradles the ovule which will become the seed – what an excellent evolutionary idea! It most likely developed from mutations in fertile leaves which caused progressive curling and enfolding. All the parts of the flower – sepal, petal, stamen – are specialized modified leaves. But whenever we discover a Bloodroot flower with more than eight petals, we can assume that some of the extra petals are stamens which have turned back the evolutionary clock to become petals again.
. .
Is there anything we can hold on to that stays, fixed and static? Is it even possible to imagine something that never changes? Do I even really know what I think I know?
. .
❦
. .
There is only one thing that each and every one of us knows. Mark Cox reminds us what it is in Knowing – it’s something no one likes to talk about, but something Mark’s poetry is able to face and say in a hundred ways until we readers become more than willing to join the conversation. We’ve known it all along, maybe at times we’ve even braced for the brief plunge toward otherness, but in these prose poems we have a guide and a friend who is just as afraid as we are but braver about sharing his fear.
. .
Does a prose poem occupy some evolutionary niche between verse and narrative? Forget its phenotype: brevity, blockiness, absent linebreaks. What’s down deeper in its DNA? It seems to carry all the genes of its poetry forebears – language and imagery, rhythm and music, even internal rhyme – but it is its own genus. Unlike a story, it has no beginning, middle, and end – it is all middle. Crisis and denouement might embrace each other in the same line. (And can we even call them lines when they are all one? Sort of like the question how many grooves there are  on a 33 ⅓ rpm LP.) In the poem, everything is happening, but how is it happening? Oh wait, as I read the poem everything is happening in me.
. .
And what happens in me over and over as I read these poems, as it dawns on me that the one thing we all know, each and every one of us, is that we will die, is this: I look up from the page and talk to myself. I query, I wonder, I argue, I confess. I pick up the threads of so many internal conversations left dangling because they were difficult, or scary, or just pushed out of the present by quotidian distractions. I’m not saying that by reading a book by Mark Cox titled Knowing I have gained or been granted my own cosmic knowing. But I have been reminded that I want to.
 . 
. .
❦ ❦ ❦
. .
Music Box
++ For Ralph Angel
. .
Everything’s just peachy, comes the world report: all clear. We are not pirouetting on the tip of time’s scalpel; we are not screwing deeper into the ground’s veneer. It is just the fleeting dance we do until the delicate box closes, having learned now to bow before hurting ourselves.
. .
Today is Thursday once again and the man next door is off to get his mail. He will wander back reading, as is his wont to do, his wizened leashed dachshund dog sniffing the leaves. The breeze passes over our shrubs and still they stand. A wary sparrow peers from them be we shouldn’t call it hiding.
. .
Yes, we have learned how to brace for the brief plunge toward otherness. We have learned to keep our eyes open to the dark, even if it doesn’t matter. We see most vividly what cannot be seen, and this is always the case.
. .
In the caves of our past, flames flickered on the rough walls. Fear grew there beyond reason and all sense of proportion. Our shadows have always been bigger than we are, the house lights shining up as they do, not down.
. .
It would make sense to be offered a tune now. Something simple and genuine, a tale of longing fulfilled. Something to do with a childhood nightlight, a mother’s cool palm. Whatever it is, it will have to be a memory wound long ago.
. .
Such a blessing might be broadcast from just about anywhere. We receive it on this bureau with no clue wherefrom it issues, which ancient satellite or lofty transmission tower. On and off like a warning beacon, the message beams. Once all is said, one has no choice but to choose. Call it grace, call it wonder, just, as they say, keep it calling.
. .
Mark Cox
from Knowing, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
Music Box first appeared in The Connecticut River Review
. .
❦ ❦ ❦
. .
Mark Cox is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. His six previous books include Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017) and Readiness (2018). Read more about and purchase Knowing at Press 53 HERE
. .. .
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
. .
IMG_0768, tree

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