Gary Carden, long time member of Netwest will receive award

Gary Carden, playwright, storyteller and writer of wonderful tales, sent his news a few days ago.

I have just been awarded the North Carolina Award in Literature. It is the highest award given by the state. The awards ceremony will be held in Raleigh on October 30th. 


Congratulations, Gary. You deserve this special award. Your friends and fellow writers in NCWN West are proud of you.

THE GIFT OF POETRY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Nancy Simpson's "Living Above the Frost Line"

December first and time to begin to think seriously about holiday gift-giving! Over the next two weeks I will be making recommendations for poetry lovers--and for those who think they don't like poetry but will change their minds once they read these books.

I will begin with my longtime friend and sister in the art, Nancy Simpson, whose Living Above the Frost Line: New and Selected Poems was published this fall by Carolina Wren Press. It's a beautiful, elegant book, with French flaps (a shawl-like dust jacket/cover) and cover image that is gorgeous. Just click on the image above to enlarge and see what I mean.

Nancy Simpson has enriched the literary community of North Carolina for over thirty years. Her work was first heralded by the late Richard Hugo when he read and celebrated her poems at the Callanwolde Literary Festival in Atlanta, shortly after she began to show her poetry around to friends and readers in the far reaches of western North Carolina. He praised her rich inner life and her ability to give expression to it as it manifested itself in her everyday life. Whether driving over the Nantahala Gorge in “Night Student,” expressing the complexity of self in “Driven into the interior,” or documenting the carnage of the first Gulf War in “Voices from the Fringe,” she brings the inner and outer worlds of her experience into a harmony that resonates like the current giving voice and shape to the mountain creeks she loves. Living Above the Frost Line: Selected and New Poems traces the growth of a poet determined to survive despite the obstacles raised by age, mortality, and the inevitable losses that come from being alive in this world. Through her poetry she greets that half-drowned woman, harking from her Florida girlhood, who appears as her muse in “Bridge On the River Kwai, “ bearing gifts of memory and sustaining images. In return the poet gives her “a mountain, the safest place to be.” Rarely has the relationship between poet and muse been so beautifully expressed.

Nancy, on the porch of her Cherry Mountain home.

I'm delighted to be able to offer several of my favorite poems.

Tanfastic

At 12:17 this Sunday

he is uninhibited

in front of God and

everybody traveling

I-75 South, a man

lounging in the bed

of his red pickup truck.

He is getting his tan

the fast way, 80 mph

stretched out

on his chaise lounge,

his black bikini

drawing the sun down.

He is holding a blue

tumbler in his hand.

I can only guess

what he is drinking.

I want to make a pass,

I mean, get past him

in this god-awful traffic.

I want to see

the face of the woman

at the steering wheel

who is taking him for a ride.

The Gleaners

In the last days of the age

word went out that women

therefore must be allowed

to participate in creation.

And there came forth an artist

calling to us, Come hither!

In the center of a cornfield

in Brasstown Valley,

she sculpted an assembly

of corn women. She fashioned

husk bodies, worked six days

making in her image. She dressed

the corn women in gauze gowns

and entwined eglantine in their

cornsilk hair. Come hither!

We entered the cornfield,

our capes waving

in the evening breeze. We

circled the corn women,

lit a circle of small fires

and danced in firelight.

In the morning we came forth

to sculpt, to paint, and to write

the story that is left to tell.

Looking For the Sons of My House

I am looking for the sons of my house,

grown from babies into boys,

three of them with dark brown eyes.

Where are they now? The one

who brought a snake down the hall

into my room. The one who

had to fall off the porch, to test every rule?

The young one who flew half-way

around the world to be my son?

Their bikes are wrecked, tossed

in the landfill with their outgrown shoes.

One day I saw they were no longer boys but men,

the one who drove me to night class in Asheville

when he was a teen, the same one

I stood with as mother of the groom.

Where are they now?

One whistles on a hillside, feeds his dogs.

One is stuck in rush-hour traffic, stuck

in a marriage I blessed. The young one

climbs today on a mountain in Switzerland.

All of them far from the mother house.

Skin Underwater

1.

From the top of the mountain we see

Town Valley submerged in clouds.

You say the word ‘ocean’ and a gull

flies from the branch of an oak,

squawks his squawk.

I know a lie when I see one.

Seagulls do not live in the mountains.

It is the woodpecker men call extinct,

alive, soaring above oaktops.

Now driving through fog in the valley

you show me things not seen before.

Men are swimming on the courthouse lawn.

Women stare fish-eyed from their gardens,

their mouths turned up.

2.

Barnacles collect on the pier.

Count one for every life you were young:

the schoolgirl, mute,

who spoke only underwater

hoping no one could decipher.

In water memories converge.

Shell is sharp to touch.

Seaweed is soft as hair, and skin

is the large sensor. Skin

keeps its own record of the day

you slit your forearm, diving

into green ocean at South Beach.

Look how barnacles bashed by waves

hold on. Some are encased in stone.

They could cut you bloody, Girl.

3.

Looking back I see my mother

was misinformed, promised an abortion

though it was illegal, five doctors

dead sure I was damaged, and certain

she would die if she gave birth.

She did sort of die, seeing me hideous

in her dream, seeing a ball of hair

bouncing in the room, in the afternoon

when she tried to rest.

I heard from her lips

how she fell down praying.

My mother was devout. I knew

she could not kill. Don’t you see?

I was in the best possible position.

A voice from a dream

Sleep again.

Dream yourself

on the north bank of the river

inconspicuous as deadwood.

Drift ashore

where grass glows at sunrise,

where light is found all day.

Dream a new body.

a blue robe, and you

walking home.

We stand over the carcass of a jellyfish.

It has given up the ghost, grown opaque.

Moon Jelly, I say, we knew you when

you lit the sky of the underworld.

And we count out loud the lines on its body

as if in counting we might learn

how long it lived in the ocean.

Gulls show interest in our arithmetic.

They circle. They fly down

to the sound of our voices.

Are we going to reach the end

of the island? Are we moving in a circle?

Light-headed we walk.

6.

It interests me seeing

the hermit scuttle away

with a moon shell for a new house.

Look how furrows of silt create

a frontal lobe. We are walking,

don’t you think, on gray matter?

I will always say yes

to almost everything you ask. Yes,

it is possible to imagine

intelligence beneath our feet.

7.

Evening turns out just as imagined.

We walk the length of the beach

and lie on the sand. We enter

the surf, our bodies submerging.

In hearing distance of a wave’s yes,

earth is a woman with plans.

What She Saw and What She Heard

On the mountain a woman saw

the road bank caved in

from winter’s freeze-thaw

and April rain erosion.

Trees leaned over the road the way

strands of hair hung on her forehead.

She gaped, her face as tortured

as the face she saw engraved in dirt.

Roots growing sideways shaped brows,

two eyes. Humus washed

down the bank like a nose.

Lower down, where a rock

was shoved out by weathering,

a hole formed the shape of a mouth.

The woman groaned, Agh!

Her spirit toppled

to the ground, slithered

under the roots of an oak.

She stood there asking

What? Who?

Back to reason, back home

she finished her questions:

What can one make of the vision, that face

on the north side of the mountain?

Reckoning comes, a thought:

It is not the image of a witch nor a god,

but Earth’s face, mouth open saying,

Save me.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THOSE WHO RESPONDED...

...to our invitation to blog about your favorite Appalachian book. All of you will be receiving prizes, so if I don't have your mailing address readily available, I may be contacting you for it. We were especially glad to be introduced to Lamb In His Bosom, and thank Gary Garden for sending us this piece. The essays on Fred Chappell's Ancestors and Others (Penny Morse),and Lewis Green's The Silence of Snakes (Bill Everett) were stand-outs as well. And although Melissa is not a Netwest member, her piece on Fair and Tender Ladies was a lovely personal testimonial. She deserves to be rewarded! Carole Thompson's piece on Glenda Barrett honors one of our own best mountain poets. So, thank you to Gary, Bill, Carole, Melissa, and Penny.
We may try another blog prompt in early summer. In the meantime, keep reading and loving what you read.

FAVORITE APPALACHIAN BOOKS

THANKS SO MUCH TO THOSE OF YOU WHO RESPONDED TO THIS BLOG REQUEST! BECAUSE IT'S EASTER WEEKEND AND PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AND WILL BE BUSY, I'M GOING TO LEAVE THE GATE OPEN FOR MORE SUCH POSTS, AND THEN, WITH NANCY AND GLENDA, CHOOSE THE ONES WE WILL HONOR WITH AN APPALACHIAN BOOK AS REWARD.

HAVE A LOVELY AND LOVING EASTER WEEKEND.

FaVORITE APPALACHIAN NOVEL: The Silence of Snakes

The following arrived this morning from Bill Everett. Thanks a lot, Bill. It's good to be reminded of Lewis Green's work.

--William Everett

I was awakened to the peculiar depth of Appalachian writing by Lewis Green’s The Silence of Snakes (1984). We were building our home on the slopes of Wolf Pen Mountain, near Waynesville, when an old friend recommended that I read a tale set where we had decided to live. The Silence of Snakes is the tragic story of a traumatized World War I hero, Earl Skiller, whose sufferings lead him to a series of gruesome murders in which the line between military heroism and depraved criminality disappears, exposing the two-edged sword of civilized “order.”

Through Green’s story I could see the life deep within these rocks and trees. I met the rattlesnakes that symbolize for Earl Skiller the secret depth of his life. As he told his fellow soldiers, “…I could turn into a rattlesnake in my mind, and then I could come and go and do my damage and nobody watched. I learned a big lesson once from rattlesnakes. … They’re silent in spite of the rattles. They’re silent at the right time. They can do a lot of damage. If they’re silent and it’s dark, then who can see ‘em?”

And I felt the ragged edge of mountain humor. Hear these lines between the discoverer of one of Skiller’s victims and the local physician. “We need fer ye to come and announce somebody dead. Some son-of-a bitch killed Mitchell Sanger. They cut his head off.” “Is that a fact? he finally asked. “Cut his head off?” “Yes sir.” “Well, I don’t have to go up there. I can tell you from here that he’s dead.”

Because of this book, the power to speak of place and of the crushing conflicts out of which humanity is hewed have remained the hallmarks of the writing in these hills.

------------------------

William Everett retired from 35 years of teaching ethics in order to write and make furniture in Waynesville, NC. He is the author of Red Clay, Blood River (2008) and numerous poems, the most recent appearing in Fresh. He blogs at www.WilliamEverett.com.

REMEMBERING RIGHTLY, by William Everett

( Photograph by Louanne Watley)

William Everett retired from 35 years of teaching ethics in order to write and make furniture in Waynesville, NC. He is the author of Red Clay, Blood River (2008) and numerous poems, the most recent appearing in Fresh. He blogs at www.WilliamEverett.com.
Remembering Rightly

I have been salvaging our old photographs by digitizing them for future generations. In my efforts I have been brought back to the ways we try to organize our lives between our past and possible futures. In our imaginations we enter a world of story untouched by ordinary history. I tried to catch this slip between the folds of objectivity in this little poem:

There is a space between chapters,
a crack in the spine,
an empty space
where two pages meet
and disappear
into a hidden abyss
where things are sewn invisibly together.

Some memory is driven by pain, fear, and anger. We have memories that we seek to flee, avenge, or obliterate. Other memories are driven by love – memories of joyous events, Edens of new beginnings, of children, spouse, and friend. In my own case, the old slides produced this poem driven by a memory of love.

Like a Russian doll
she wears each passage of her life in polymorphous coats.
She is the wise companion, etched by years of circling suns,
the woman burnished silver with accomplishment,
the mate with auburn hair and radiant eyes,
the holder of the household lamp,
the mother of the squirming baby nestling at her breast,
the college ingénue with voice of lark and witty tongue,
the pigtail girl in the taffeta dress,
the urchin hanging from her knees and laughing at her dad.

They hide,
a manifold of nesting forms
around the holy light within
each one the doll,
each one the woman that I love.

For some, the “crack in the spine” is full of fear and pain, for others, joys and Russian dolls forgotten in the daily grind. Most of us will find a mixture where we seek an alchemy to compound futures out of right remembrance.
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William Johnson Everett
465 Harriett's Trail
Waynesville, NC 28786
828-452-0965
Subscribe to my blog at http://www.williameverett.com/.
Explore Red Clay, Blood River at http://www.redclaybloodriver.com/.