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Homecoming – Sam Ragan and Shelby Stephenson

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Fred Chappell, GCDPS, Lenard D. Moore, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, poetry, Press 53, Sam Ragan, Sharon Sharpe, Shelby Stephenson, Southern writing, Susan Laughter Myers, Weymouth on March 22, 2015| Leave a Comment »

. . . it is nothing but a song – the long journey home:

Homecoming – what sort of images does that word evoke?

Marching band lined up, the girls with their blue and gold pom poms, boys becoming men bursting through crepe paper onto the field.

All the old families filing into Salem Fork Baptist for preaching, and in the afternoon pot luck under the willow oaks.

A long absence, a holiday, sitting down to share the meal with family, wondering where you really belong and beginning to get an inkling.

The prodigal returning to discover the grace of unconditional love.

. . .

How about this one: men and women who have known each other for fifty years, or one year, or just today, gathered in a single great room to listen and be silent, to laugh and to cry, to start out wondering whether they belong and discover themselves bound together by the soul of words into one family.

Sam Ragan Poetry Festival at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities and the tenth anniversary celebration of the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series – friends, it was one hell of a homecoming! Oh yes, the readings, Fred Chappell bringing new poems, fables and morals to slap you upside the head; Gilbert-Chappell mentors Cathy Smith Bowers, Joseph Bathanti, Lenard D. Moore, Tony Abbott each with their prized student protege from the program; from basketball to angels; from love lost to love well shet of; from growing up to growing old to refusing in any fashion to grow old. And the greetings – more hugs and handclasps per unit time than any baby shower or wake or political convention on record.

And then there was Shelby Stephenson. Our “newest” NC Poet Laureate? How about our oldest and truest friend and guide? Has anyone in our state done more to encourage poets? To teach and encourage? To just plain get the poetry joy juice flowing in the crowd’s veins?

When I read the announcement that Shelby had been selected as Poet Laureate I immediately dug out my file – all the rejection slips he sent me while he was editor at Pembroke magazine. Friends, you would have to knock me down to get me to part with these sixteen little 2 x 3 inch slips of yellow paper (some actually just a post-it note with the Pembroke rubber stamp). Almost every one has a personal scribble: “good luck placing these” . . . “keep writing” . . . ” liked [poem] best” . . . “send more any time.” My God, how I harassed him with submissions until glory be one was good enough to keep.

Shelby Stephenson, thanks for the poetry homecoming. I am still discovering where I belong.

* * * * *

from fiddledee
(read by Shelby at the 2015 Sam Ragan Poetry Festival)

Saying I need an image to make the world
I went back home and held my eyes on the hill
and it said You need a word deeper than I

so I took the old fencerails the lizards ran
and my family’s tongue came out of the Mouth
of Buzzard’s Branch, the sound of that one story,

everywhere, in the marshes, in the fields,
and lowgrounds, and I said Where is the word
that holds All I am trying to say? –

and the cows lowed through their cuds over
and over it is nothing but a song – the long journey home:

* * * * *

. . . let go the body: the cardinal

flowers stretch across the landscape, handsome
in their high keys: there goes a plankhouse into
a hedge: we come from a desert of innumerable

dances made in pain and pleasure arriving
forever, America’s promise, Huckleberry
laid back every spring when the little green

corn is sided, what broken clods to bounce
in the dirt: the literature of the world
is the people: Whitman, where are you? Our

faculties run out into the unknown:
results are beginning, continuously
extending the plain chance to hold a seat,

here, hardy as a foot soldier: an articulate
voice lowers to let the mind down so the
undergarments might hear humanity

in the bosom stumbling back to breathe independently:
transitory, we bequeath to thee, O Death,
this victorious song thou breaks, the word

of the singer, his parentage and home,
the wood in the flames a quiet crackle
of no hurry going up and out, moving

the dust that settles the ashes, a tune,
a farway injury of happiness,
a bliss that is hard to empty: time and space

affirm the rhythm, the dimensions of
across and around: wrap a tent around
the music and steal away: images edge

the feelings like heels grinding lightly on
a board of closest imaginative
stances delighting the reapers in the

wheat, the keepers in the creek: the word is
another form of dancing: the body
moves on the surface just over truth: we

live amid the skin: the true art of
experience is practiced by the skipper
bugs: they skate so well: I clap my hands and

the water scoots a wake beating with a
new beauty: and the line which begins behind
is brought forward: I look back one more time

to draw a radiance in language, a
radical system formless and grammatically
mountainous and divine, mortal as the

fertilizing rain, a lingering space
that gives the celebration a morning, noon
and night swallowed up by the dallying and playing

world holding the ancient beard in an avenging
dance, a cosmos for jollity: high in
the pocket of a farmhouse I am alone,

a laughing moon brightening like an orange on ice.

* * * * *

fiddledeedee
© 2014 by Shelby Stephenson, Press 53, Winston-Salem, NC

More information about Shelby at http://www.shelbystephenson.com/home.htm

* * * * *

Over the next couple of weeks I will share more vignettes, poetry and photos from the 2015 Sam Ragan Poetry Festival & tenth anniversary celebration of the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poetry Series

Also check back for a link to the full photo gallery, forthcoming

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So Many Voices — Pat Riviere Seel

Posted in Imagery, tagged NC Zoo, Pat Riviere-Seel, poetry, Southern writing, Weymouth on June 2, 2012| 13 Comments »

In three weeks my cousin Pat is going to take a small step into the vast unknown. Pat Riviere-Seel is going to spend a week at the NC Zoological Park in Asheboro as its first Poet-in-Residence. She and I have been whispering and tittering (in the email sense) about her preparations almost daily because just a few weeks after her sojourn ends I am going to follow her in the same role. And yes, before you ask, the curators have promised fresh straw in our cages.

How does one qualify to become a Zoo Poet? The decision process of the artistic committee that established this new program remains obscure to us, the selected, but I can tell you a little about Pat’s qualifications as a poet. She has the ability to imagine herself into unimaginable personalities. She can speak in the voices of the voiceless . . . so many voices. To read her poetry is to be touched, mind and heart, by people you could never otherwise have known.

Perhaps some of this creative skill has grown from her affliction, as she describes it, of “recovering journalist.” In the thousands of interviews and articles over the years, how many personalities consumed her? How many epiphanies when she suddenly saw with another person’s eyes and felt the whole of their motivations? In her book The Serial Killer’s Daughter, Pat has completed the astonishing transition from journalist to poet. Through the poems speak not only the daughter and mother, but other family members, victims, onlookers. The story as it unfolds, and as the daughter begins to suspect, gives me a chill every time I read it. It can’t be easy to weave together fear and desperation with calculating cruelty and still leave the reader with a sense of compassion, but my cousin Pat is someone ever willing to take a step into the vast unknown.

. . . . .

My Brother’s Keeper

My brother doesn’t believe me
when I tell him it’s no accident
everyone close to Mama dies.

Always Mama’s favorite, he’s
the smart one, college degree,
office job. He can’t afford

a stain of doubt ringing
the collar of his starched
life. How could he forget

what happened when
he enlisted: Mama declared
the Army wouldn’t take him,

a widow’s only son. Two weeks
she railed like a street preacher
calling to the lost. My brother claimed

Mama’s grief soured his stomach.
It’s nothing, he told me. Just the stress
from seeing Mama so upset.

He forced himself to eat with us
the day before he left. No cake,
he said to me. But Mama insisted.

Clumsy, she screeched
as I slipped
and the cake shattered.

. . . . .

Yes, Pat and I are really cousins. Her great-grandfather, the Reverend J.N.S. Daub, is also my mother’s great-grandfather. That makes us second cousins one generation removed. (Your attention please: due to the vagaries of genealogical arithmetic, this does not mean that Pat is old enough to be my mother.) We discovered this connection only about ten years ago when we met at an NCPS meeting and she mentioned that she’d just attended a family reunion in Lewisville. I said, “Hey, that’s where my great-great-grandfather is buried,” then later mailed her a photo I’d taken of the headstone. Cosmic!

And as far as her being selected as Zoo Poet, I also happen to know that Pat has written a number of poems about bears.

The Poets-in-Residence will be offering adult and youth workshops during our weeks with the animals. For more information about Pat, me, and the third Zoo Poet Michael Beadle follow these links!

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Pinesong Dedication 2012

Posted in Imagery, tagged Carolyn and Guy York, NCPS, poetry, Southern writing, Weymouth on May 20, 2012| 1 Comment »

The gardens at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, NC are a site to restore your soul. Huge weeping cherry trees, perennial gardens, poet’s garden, frog pond, the adjacent old-growth longleaf pine savannah of Weymouth Woods . . . I first absorbed their restorative atmosphere about twelve years ago. It was at the close of the last century, and I was enjoying the approach of evening beside the water lilies, preparing to attend my first NC Poetry Society board meeting as treasurer. In the diminishing light a vision appeared before me. An elegant couple approached across the manicured grounds, he a dapper gentleman with a graying beard, she a slender beautiful woman with an astonishing floral hat. I said to myself, I am in the right place.

No, it wasn’t Zelda and F. Scott (although doubtless they were frequent visitors when the Boyds resided at Weymouth). Guy and Carolyn York became my friends in that garden that evening and have been ever since. For two decades they have served the NC Poetry Society with warmth, creativity, and tireless enthusiasm. During the fourteen years they shared as Vice Presidents for Membership they assured that every new member could say, “I am in the right place.” They greeted every person who walked into the Garden Room to attend an NCPS meeting or workshop at Weymouth. They kept straight the status and address of some 400 members to make sure we’d receive our Pine Whispers newsletters and notices about contests and gatherings. Every new member for almost a decade and a half has received a welcoming packet of readings, poems, notices and tidbits that bear Carolyn’s distinctive touch.

One perquisite of serving on the NCPS Board is the social time on Friday night after the two- or three-hour long Board meeting – and no such gathering could ever be complete without Guy’s bottomless well of recitation: Tennyson, Kipling, Shakespeare, and a few limericks it would be illegal to post. Now Carolyn and Guy have taken a hiatus from the Board for a year or two, but in 2013 Carolyn has agreed to serve as President and Guy will assume an At Large position. Meanwhile they attend every meeting, volunteer in the book room, and continue to share their humor and style – folks, if you are in a room with Carolyn and Guy, you are in the right place.

The vote was unanimous. The North Carolina Poetry Society Board of Directors has dedicated the 2012 edition of our annual anthology, Pinesong, to Carolyn and Guy York. Congratulations, friends and companions! Here’s to a few more decades together of celebration and poetry.

. . . . .

Sugar Dust

Over time
the round pale moon
crumbles
like the
sugar cookie
of our childhood days
that we saved
and ate clandestine
in the closet
of the nursery
secretly – a bit at a time
a bite at a time –
until nothing was left
except the
sparkling
crumbs
which clung to our fingers.

In the sky of mooncrumble
nothing remains
in the velvet darkness
but sweet crystals of star dust.

. . . . .

Dream Within a Dream is Carolyn’s Southern gothic mystery novel which incorporates Carolyn’s poetry to enhance the atmosphere of magnolia blossoms and dark secrets.

Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities

North Carolina Poetry Society

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