Two weeks ago, redroom.com asked its members to blog on the topic of "my favorite poem." How could I choose? One poem from all the ones I love? Then I took a look at our Aero garden and knew. Verde, que te quiero verde!
GIVING MYSELF OVER TO GREEN
Poets are fickle creatures. We fall in love over and over again.We can never remain faithful to only one poet. I began to understand this the day I forsook Wordsworth in my college Spanish class. My poetic guide. My first love. How could I?
What was I doing in a Spanish class anyway? Hadn’t my father instructed me to take either French or German, the latter being his grandmother’s native tongue?
He would have found it silly, the way my infatuation began, with a 75 rpm record bought during my senior year in high school. The Music of Spain. I listened at night after lights out to “Granada” and “Malaguena.” The hair on the nape of my neck trembled. The dark outside my windows beckoned.
And so, on the first day of classes in a small woman’s college in Georgia, I sat down to learn Spanish from a short rotund woman who demanded we call her La Senora, although she had never married. I read the classics of Spanish literature, moving inexorably toward the 20th century where in the anthology’s last section, I found Romance Sonambula and, and in the burst of a verde viento, the English Romantic poets became as dust to me. I fell in love with Federico Garcia Lorca. In Spanish. No matter how many translations of his work I’ve read over the years, the original Spanish has never lost its seductiveness, whether I read it silently or, better, aloud.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda,
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Not that I agreed with La Senora that everything sounded better in Spanish. Shakespeare? Wordsworth? Keats? No, I already knew that the language of poets is beautiful, no matter what it is. Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, French, English....Cherokee.
Garcia Lorca’s poetry spun me around, gave me a new way of experiencing language, my own language, which was now infused with the cante jondo of Andalusia.
Even now, years later, I recite those lines as a kind of mantra, Verde, que te quiero verde... and I still love the feel of them in my mouth. I love the deep song of them in my viscera. I have dreamed of trying to save Lorca in the olive grove, with only my child’s fingers pointed like guns at his assassins.
Verde, que te quiero verde.
Not even these lines can stop bullets. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. I know that.
But they live on in our daily lives, these words we love. They wait patiently for us. I had to reach middle age before Garcia Lorca’s duende found its way into my own poems.
Gone
Long before I could read Lorca
I wanted to give myself over to green
as he had and be lost like a sleepwalker
in it. I wanted to hide in the honeysuckle
and never come home if it meant I must stay
by the telephone, waiting for someone
to call with the doctor’s pronouncement,
my mother then turning to us saying
over and over again in my memory, Gone.
Such a word I would never repeat
to the oaks that held sway round my favorite pasture,
or blackberry bushes I dreamed would stay
unscythed by road crews sent forth to claim
right of way. Verde, que te quiero verde,
I’d gladly have cried if I could,
but where are such beautiful words
when we need them? And what if that’s all
this poem means now I’m middle-aged: words
as a way to want green back again
and myself in the throes of it,
even though I’ve learned enough about Lorca
at last to be quite sure that no verde
anywhere spending its June on this earth
could have outstayed for one blessed
second what waits at the end
of the line, always some bloodless voice
trying hard to sound human across so much
distance, its words still escaping me.
(from The Store of Joys, NC Museum of Art)
W.H. Auden said that art is a way of breaking bread with the dead. Each time a poet begins to write, or to read a poem, she takes the bread of those gone before and places it in her mouth. She does this over and over again. With one poet. Another, and yet another, living or dead. She loves the taste of the bread they share. So many poets. So many poems. By the end of her life she will contain, like Whitman, multitudes, and will never again try to answer the question, “What is your favorite poem?”
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Jerry Taylor of Young Harris, Georiga plays a 1935 Imperial organ, the first of his collection of antique reed organs.
Brenda Kay Ledford's article, "The Organ Loft," was published in the January, 2010 issue of COUNTRY EXTRA. The feature is about Jerry Taylor, official historian of Towns County, Georgia and his unique collection of over 30 antique reed organs. To order a copy of this magazine, go to: www.//country-magazine.com.
Local writers Nancy Sales Cash, Celia Miles (standing), Peg Russell, Brenda Kay Ledford, and Blanche Ledford (from left) whose work appeared in CLOTHES LINES attended a book signing on December 12, 2009 at the Curiosity Shop in downtown Murphy, NC. They thank all who attended to make the event a success.
The Nazim Hikmet Poetry festival competition is now open. The closing date is Feb. 19, so begin to think about the poems you wish to submit. For more information about the Festival, please go to www.nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org. I'd like to see some of our Netwest members entering this contest.
The second annual Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Festival will be held on Sunday, April 18, 2010 in Cary, North Carolina. As we bring together poets and poetry lovers, participation of area poets will be an essential part of this Festival. Interested poets are invited to submit their poems by Friday, February 19, 2010. The selected poems will be published on-line at the Festival web site as well as in the Festival Chapbook, and the poets will be invited to read their winning poems and introduce their poetry at the Festival. Each finalist will receive an award of $100. Last year's winning poems can be found at the festival web site.The 2009 festival chapbook is available at Amazon.com.
GENERAL RULES:
Deadline: Entries received by Friday, February 19, 2010 will be considered for selection.
Submission Requirements:
(*) All entries MUST be submitted via www.nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org
(*) All poems submitted to the Festival must be unpublished, original works.
(*) Each poet can submit up to three poems.
(*) The poems should be in English.
(*) The selected poems will be published on-line at the Festival web site as well as in the Festival Chapbookl. By submitting their poems, the poets grant NHPF all rights to publish the poems at these venues.
(*) After the festival, the chapbook will be available for purchase at amazon.com. The proceeds from the chapbook sales will be used to support future festivals.
(*) The poets will retain copyrights of their poems.
Selection & Notification
(*) Submitted poems will be evaluated anonymously.
(*) The contact information provided by the poets will not be disclosed to other individuals or organizations.
(*) The poets will be notified of their poem’s status by March 22, 2010.
POETRY SELECTION COMMITTEE:
John Balaban, Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence, NC State University
Kathryn Stripling Byer, 2005-2009 NC Poet Laureate
Greg Dawes, Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, NC State University
Joseph Donahue, Senior Lecturing Fellow, Department of English, Duke University
Jackie Shelton Green, Piedmont Laureate
Hatice Örün Öztürk (ATA-NC Representative), Associate Professor, Department of ECE, NC State University
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS:
This event is organized by the American Turkish Association of North Carolina (www.ata-nc.org )
Organizing committee: Buket Aydemir, Pelin Balı, Erdag Göknar, Mehmet Öztürk, and Birgül Tuzlalı
Contact: contact@nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org
As some of you know, I’ve been keeping a poetry website for the past fifteen months dedicated to promoting southern and Appalachian poets. It is free and all are welcome. It is not a formal web site but rather it’s a blog site with my main topic being poetry. It is called LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE. I set up this site during a NCWN West Saturday workshop in Oct. 2008. I had no grand goals then, no ulterior motives what so ever. I only wanted to promote the poetry of our poets writing in the mountains and some of them in other forgotten parts of the south. I was amazed at how easy it was to communicate with other writers, and I was thrilled by your response.
The growing seasons gets extended for those who dwell above the frost line. Extending the growth season is something I’ve experienced since first coming to Cherry Mountain in the southern Appalachian mountains. A companion idea is that one’s writing life can also be extended. It’s true. Never has it been more true than this year in December 2009. Just after the hard freeze, as the last of the flowers melted into the ground, word of my poems came back to me from the literary world.
Word came from Carolina Wren Press, Durham, North Carolina, that they will publish a collection of my poetry in the forthcoming spring titled Living Above the Frost Line - Selected and New Poems. It is to be the first book in their new Carolina Laureate Series and was chosen by NC Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer. The collection will span 32 years of my poetry writing career.
I signed my book contract on December 24th, and Janice Townley Moore, my long time poetry writing buddy, witnessed my signature. We met in the parking lot at Kerr Drug Store and sat there in my car laughing and saying “Who would have thought it?” and “On Christmas Eve.” Then I drove to the US Post Office in Hayesville and mailed the contract back to the press, imagining how on Christmas Eve, the contract might accidentally end up in Santa’s sled.
Today on the first day a the new year 2010, I find myself singing “Happy New Year” every time the phone rings, and I find myself more filled with hope than I have been in a long time.
Happy New Year and Best Wishes to all of you Netwest Writers and to others reading and writing in the mountains.
Please visit when you get the time. http://www.nancysimpson.blogspot.com/
