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Posts Tagged ‘Southern writing’

Kat Kong, Dogzilla & Fred Chappell

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on October 5, 2014| 2 Comments »

Red-tipped maples along the ridgeline and pumpkins lined up at Hawks Produce (as well as Brushy Mtn. Stayman Winesaps almost the size of pumpkins) – you know what that means: Halloween is coming! When Linda was growing up Halloween wasn’t one single evening, it was an entire month, sort of the Olympics of holidays. Linda’s Mom Donna French was really into costumes and stories and pageantry in her job as an elementary school librarian, and her seven kids became the flock to her Bo Peep, the Hansel and Gretels to her Wicked Witch, the entire cast of characters to her Mother Goose. In fact, the first time I met Linda (November 1, 1966, eighth grade and first day at my new school), she was wearing the unexpectedly indelible vestiges of the previous night’s costume.

So October 1 Linda mentioned to Saul two books that we’ve inherited from Grandma French’s large collection, and when he came home from school with us the next afternoon he was ready for me to read them to him: Kat Kong . . . and Dogzilla. Saul calls them the “Double Feature.” He has set up an entire audience of Lego men, Blue Rat, Mousie, and various other little critters to view the performance. He does the sound effects, monsters growling and crashing into things, and I do the narration and dialogue. Roll ‘em! Action! Halloween is only four weeks away!

Whoa, I’d better start thinking about MY costume. Hmmm . . . how about Rat-cula? And if you’ve got a kid or grandkid that thrives on silly, you need to track down copies of Kat Kong and Dogzilla, written and illustrated by Dav Pilkey with the help of his pet mice, cat, and corgi. At the time he created these in the 1990’s he was living in Kent, Ohio and was a friend of Grandma French’s.

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Now for a poem to get you into the Halloween spirit. Who’s your favorite poet? If “favorite” means you seek out all their books and keep coming back to them year after year, I guess Fred Chappell is mine. His latest book, Familiars, is filled with the personalities, imaginings, and eccentric doings of cats. And if you shudder at the approach of ghouls and spirits, if you dread the thought that you might be haunted by former lives, perhaps you really don’t want to be a cat . . .

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Ghost Story

What does Alexander see,
Staring with taut fixity
Into the dusty corner there
And its eerily vacant air?

Perhaps invisible Somethings flock
That barren angle of the room
And speak to him at twelve o’clock
Of an unalterable doom.

It would not be a single ghost
But several who gaze and wait
Until the Halloween veils with frost
The leaf-strewn lawn, the gray roof-slate,

To whisper to him in unison
The dreaded sentence that constrains
Him to a destiny fordone:
“Us eight you squandered. One remains.”

Fred Chappell, from Familiars, LSU Press, 2014

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　Mousie&punkins

Mousie will be ready for a snack at the next Double Feature.

Kat Kong and Dogzilla © Dav Pilkey, Harcourt and Brace

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Voices from the Porch — Judith Behar

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Every workday I’m out the door with a travel mug just as the sun pokes through the pines on Johnson Ridge across the valley. One solace – I leave by the back door, through the screened porch, embraced by the centenary beech before I get in my car. If there’s a little light it’s a herald of goldfinches; if full dark a doe might spook. The ‘possum might still be rooting in the compost. All just outside my porch.

This morning March snow is sifting through the screen and puddling on the planks. Office closed (at least until noon). While coffee perks I shove the screened door open against a drift of heavy white and toss a couple of handfuls of seed to the ground feeders. I huddle against the house until the birds return (they’d only flown twenty feet into the hickory branches). Hello, my friends. On the porch I’m only ten feet from the phone, the bills, the desk-high tasks undone, and three miles away I can hear traffic on I-77 unslowed by a little precipitation, but here is sanctuary.

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How many porches have acquired personality in your memory? Grandmother’s in Hamlet: the swing hanging from heavy chains, for Bob and me a pirate ship, a jet plane. Nana’s in Morehead: the smell of Bogue Sound, the chaise lounge one of us would sleep on when the July nights were too hot; our own first porch, the red rental house in Durham on Green Street, a family portrait with toddler Josh and Margaret just beginning to smile, all of us smiling.

With such an archetype it must have been easy for Maureen Sherbondy to elicit the poems, essays, short fiction that she has compiled into Voices from the Porch (Favorite Gathering Places). It is an anthology broad as a coastline or a rural avenue, but also deep in the secret heart of people gathered and torn. It’s a tangled story of memories and feelings that won’t allow themselves to be laid aside. It is voices that have whispered and will continue to whisper to each of us.

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Judith Behar’s poem Evening opens the collection. Like opening a door onto a space of sanctuary, and revelation.

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Evening

Dusk rises from the pond,
misty and green, then gray;
a bullfrog croaks his song
up to the darkening porch
where three women drink wine by candlelight,
the humid air like saris on their skin.
They idly talk of gardening and plans
for summer travel. Work falls away,
lines soften, then disappear
in shadow. A slivered moon
hangs in a cloudless sky.
They clear the dishes, carry their glasses in –
their day ended, the guests depart.
Creatures of the night
swarm in the grass.

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Judith Behar lives in Greensboro and is the volunteer publicity director for Writers Group of the Triad. She has taught English at Guilford College and practiced law in Greensboro for 30 years. Her poems and short stories appear in a number of publications, including contest winners in Pinesong, published by the NC Poetry Society.

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One more reason to consider sitting down in the porch swing and reading this anthology: my short story Overflowing about Jimmy, Nella, and Monty in Surry County and the danger of love.

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The Holly Jolly Variations – Primate Behavior

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on December 27, 2012| 4 Comments »

My grandson’s favorite Christmas song this year is Holly Jolly Christmas by Burl Ives.  This is really not so astonishing – the first record we ever played for him was a collection of folk songs by Burl Ives.  By the time Saul was two he was requesting him by name: “Play Bur Lives.”

What did astonish me today, though, was realizing that Saul knows all the words to the song.  I was impersonating a fly on the wall with a magazine while he built a little Lego house and had all his Lego men come visit.  The entire time he was working, he sang.  Say Hello to folks you know / and everyone you meet.  Or sometimes just recited.  Hey Ho, the mistletoe, hung where you can see.  With an entire village of different voices, tempos, timbres.  Somebody waits for you / Kiss her once for me!  Sometimes tuneful little boy soprano, sometimes gruff, briefly importuning, and when he noticed me listening quite loud and raucous.  All the Holly Jolly variations.

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A four-year old is a highly evolved little primate.  He knows just how far he can boss Pappy around before he’s crossed the line.  He can ask for ice cream a half hour before supper and convince Pappy the request is not at all unreasonable.  He operates on the rock solid premise that simply wanting a thing fully entitles the person to get it.  Or, and this is much more likely, he knows all the rules full well but also knows from experience that with the one-hundred-and-first request the rule might shatter.

But what happens if I sometimes call the little anthropoid’s bluff and just laugh?  He laughs too, and we go on to the next game.

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I bought Sarah Lindsay’s book Primate Behavior at a reading she gave in Southern Pines this year.  Reading it is like an archeological dig: each poem must be read carefully, brushed with fine bristles, held up to the sky.  No bulldozers, please.  I’m still working my way, layer by layer.  I’m discovering that there is unrevealed depth and complexity to us hominids.  I wonder, how did Lindsay get hold of my family tree?

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Primate Behavior

What was she looking for, the woman two days from
the end of a wasting death
who told her nursing daughter, “Shave my legs”?
Or the hospital-ridden one
who, coming out of ether, could only keep saying she couldn’t
be comfortable
without her panties on.

If one of us slips on ice, he or she
checks first for an audience, second for broken bones.
We are the apes
with mirrors inside our heads.  We pick our noses,
we fart and enjoy it,
but this is rarely mentioned.  We make fun of outdated clothes.
We listen to music.

In a thick place of mountain bamboo the
gorilla mother
croons and cradles her young one in her arm.
With her other large hand
she catches her own dung and eats it.
A hum of insects and green wet rot.
The father beside her sleeps.  Is it eight-thirty Monday?
His lower lip hangs on his chest.
Alone at her golden oak table
the young lady licks her finger, dots at the grains
of spilled sugar,
and licks it again.

Close to the Pole, where daytime stretches
like taffy
and icebergs move in vast and moaning herd, a furry man
scrawls a few notes in Norwegian.  He cannot carry a tune,
but he can make stew.  He has thought of little else but stew
and warming his feet for weeks.  Realizing
how dirty his face is, he tells himself:
I am here for no personal good, but to help make maps.
I am civilized.  See the word Forward is drawn on my heart.
And he throws some dried fish to the dogs.

from Primate Behavior, Sarah Lindsay, Grove Press, © 1997 by Sarah Lindsay

Sarah Lindsay received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and currently lives in Greensboro.  Primate Behavior was a National Book Award finalist.  Lindsay’s latest book of poetry, Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), was selected as a “Favorite Book of 2008” by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine.

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