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Posts Tagged ‘Southern writing’

Unsettled – Jodi Barnes

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on March 24, 2012| 4 Comments »

I’ve lived in this little town for thirty-one years, but almost every day someone still asks me, “Where you from?”  I don’t tell them.  Maybe if I’m not in my long-suffering persona at the moment I might just say, “Here.”  And move on.  Or I might sidestep with, “How far back do you mean?” and if they press then I inform them that my Griffin forebears moved down here from Virginia to Union County (near Charlotte) before the Revolution.  Or I might go on the offensive: “All my folks are from around here,” with further ammunition that my Mom grew up in Winston-Salem and Dad in Hamlet.

But I never tell them where I was actually born.  That would end the conversation.  Because what they’re really saying is, “You ain’t from around here, are you?”  And I’ll be damned if I’m going to confirm it.

Why?  What’s the big deal?  Afraid of being labeled a Yankee?  It’s not as if there aren’t fifty other things besides my pure midwestern accent that brand me an outsider in this rural county.  Not Baptist.  Not Republican.  Not a football fan.  Not a Tarheel (although I have no compunction about letting my Carolina friends know I went to Duke).

No, I’m not running away from the things I’m not.  I”m running toward what I long to be.  Not exactly a state of being, but a state of belonging.

I belong to North Carolina and it belongs to me.  I’ve slept on the ground in its forests and mountains.  I’ve drunk from its streams.  I’ve planted trees here.  I can recite its toast: Here’s to the land of the longleaf pine . . . .  I’ve lived in a lot of other towns and a lot of other states, but this is the one I need to accept me and take me in and hold me.  Maybe it’s exactly because I lived in so many different places growing up – I need some place where I belong.

So I won’t apologize for getting defensive when someone tries to imply I’m not from around here.  Just take heart all you folks who have moved more than twenty miles from the place where you were born.  Even if your great x 10 grandfather didn’t live here, you can belong.  Just put down a taproot of love, and when someone asks where you’re from, you tell them, “Right here, damn it.”

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Moving – I couldn’t help but get agitated about all those moves after reading that Jodi Barnes has moved at least twenty-four times in her life, as far as she can remember.  Her book Unsettled keeps returning to that theme, the quest for belonging.  Of course there are the boxes packed, unpacked, repacked, and their tangible artifacts of memory.  We can’t let go of things because we can’t bear to be cut off from our past.  Memories – are they really roots that are strong enough to feed us?  Is home what we’ve left behind or where we long to arrive?

Jodi’s poems reveal so many things left behind.  Love: we thought it was real, but it has moved on without us.  Lives: that pack our hearts long after we’ve lost them.  So many false steps and false starts that may end with us feeling cut off.  Is there any hope for us wayfaring strangers to finally discover our home?  The gods of metaphor; the dirt beneath our feet; the persona of myth we don like an astonished cloak; all those things that leave us feeling uncertain and longing.  Everything unsettled.  And yet . . .

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Pretend Pioneer

My friends ask, are you moved in yet?
They mean is my stuff unpacked;
am I settled?
I envision wagon wheels,
mail-order brides, the frontier.

But here my sole risk is to trip
over cardboard,
the clutter of privilege.

Once I unwrap what I thought I’d need,
I circle camps of chattel on a polished floor,
stretch the metaphor of expansion,
contrast this mansion with teepee
desire – its flapping door.

Next time I’ll answer Hell No –
I got to keep moving.

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The Hardness of Cardboard Philosophy

Memories hide beneath cardboard wings,
seek solace against worn seams.
Last night, I dreamed this box
grew feathers and flew away.

But it stays, obeys gravity,
reminds me of a frayed decision:
to face the weight or leave this matter
to tidy imagination.

I think I remember why it’s no use
to ply back flaps on time capsules.
It’s the same stuff.  Pixies don’t exist.
And there is no magic in this dust.

Yet something pulls me to the drab,
unrelenting, rectangular shape,
my arms extend, my fingers bend
to search breaches in brittle tape.

Strands of hair, stale baby’s breath,
baptismal candle, eyelet gown,
first tooth, proof of life –
unmoved, they stare me down.

As I try to keep them dry,
not mourn her past, the missed –
angelic imps resist my wish; the box sits.
Another blurred present flies by.

From Unsettled, (c) 2010, Jodi Barnes, Main Street Rag Publishing

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With his masters in chemical engineering, my Dad got a job with Western Electric straight out of Georgia Tech.  I was born in Niagara Falls, the American side.

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Green Daughters — Diana Pinckney

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , 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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Voices of the Lost

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on May 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

A couple of years ago my friend Mike and I went backpacking in the Slickrock Wilderness,  near Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.  On day one we reached our camp site in mid-afternoon, about half-way up the mountain along Little Santeetlah Creek.  With tent pitched and bear bags hung, I lay down in a patch of sun to listen to the chatter and riffle of cold crystal over moss-draped boulders, laughter over smoothworn gravel.

As I dozed, water voices sang to me.  Urgent conversations, reminding, cajoling, the words critical but somehow never clear.  I half-dreamed of the people that had walked these hills.  Native hunters stalking deer where the clamor masks the sound of their approach.  Homesteaders sledging river stones to turn to cornerstones beneath chestnut timbers.  Foresters marking the next stand they’ll cut, somehow never reaching the old growth poplar and hemlock at Joyce Kilmer.

So many voices lost in the creek’s murmurings, yet also brought to life in that mutter. Aren’t we as poets the keepers of lost voices?  We capture in a phrase a moment that would have been forgotten, an image that would fade.  If we can speak for those who have no words they will “bless us with their bones.”

This poem by Margaret Boothe Baddour, For the Lost Poets, speaks to all who would be keepers of lost voices.  Seeking a mountaintop, discovering a new high place, she revivifies those poets whose voices might have been overcome by the clamorous falling water of years.  Before we can say, “We are lost,” we find ourselves in a new place with new breath.  Be still, listen for meaning within the whisper, the murmur, the water, the earth.  Someone wants to speak to you.

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Star Chickweed

For the Lost Poets
           —            Wildacres, 2008

For every day they die among us,
those who knew it was never enough
but hoped to improve a little by living.
             –   W.H.Auden, “In Memory of Freud”

I.  They Whisper to Us
On this mountain top – so high not even birds
fly here and only small, complcated insects
amid the ox-eye daisies and wild yarrow
worry us with their rush-roar-whir –
we brieve for those poets whose rustling voices
the quiet, the strong, even the raucous ones
are lost.  No, not lost.  Only hushed.
They whisper from just over the next hill.

II.  We Are Lost
We lose our way, looking for Roan Mountain
where, folks say, the pale pink laurel grows.
At the crossroads, an old man stand
like a cigar store Indian.  His white mustache
and brogans, his worn overall speak hillbilly
but before we can say, “We are lost, he smiles
gap-toothed and points like a sign: “Turn left,”
he says.  “Three mile uphill to Roan Mountain.”

III.  They Leave Their Words
At the Continental Divide, we glimpse horses
but the cows up here, the cows so black and sleek
where sun shafts the greensward, the water so pure
at the place where it runs downhill to the east
where bugs whir in the clover!  A white moth
brushes our arms.  Like moths, those lost poets
touch, leave their words hanging, alive in the air.

IV.  We Breathe for Them
Flash of fire – a mountain man, wave of water –
an ocean lover, the stillness of stone,
the roar of wind, all those poet friends
whose wise, strong words provoked this world
have now become the earth and air.  They bless us
with their bones.  Now we must breathe for those
who, when they breathed their last, exhaled in verse.

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from Scheherazade and other poems by Margaret Boothe Baddour, Saint Andrews College Press, 2009.

Margaret teaches Humanities, Creative Writing, and Drama at wayne Community College in Goldsboro, NC, where she holds the Bell Distinguished Chair in Teaching.  Among her many awards and honors is the NC Poet Laureate Prize of the NC Poetry Society.

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