I have never fired a gun, and I hope to keep it that way. This poem is inspired by a place I visited near the Vermont Studio Center. It was in January, and all of the objects mentioned were scattered in a clearing at the top of a hill.  It reminded me, simultaneously, of my mother’s and my husband’s home towns in rural Maine. It’s a tough life and most of my cousins and friends who live there, work in the woods or in factories. They hunt, of course. Guns are fairly commonplace.  Whenever I am in the woods, either there or here in South Carolina, I hear guns going off. It’s hunters, of course.

 

My father was a former Marine, and he kept a gun in a drawer bedside my parent’s bed. I stayed away from it. There’s no question that guns are readily available in this country. I don’t really understand that part of being an American….the right to bear arms and so on. It made sense during the Revolutionary War, but it seems like a rather primitive and archaic concept in 2011. Owning a gun for hunting is one thing, but gun ownership has become something else. It’s a symbol that seems to have more to do with ego than anything else.

 

A gun is a weapon – period. A friend of mine was shot five times by her estranged husband in front of their children. There’s no question that she would be alive today, if it hadn’t been so easy for him to get a gun in a moment of despair. He will spend the rest of his days regretting what he did. There are thousands of stories like this. We are all too familiar with the large scale tragedies associated with guns. It seems to be an example of how money and business, the very well endowed NRA/gun lobby, are the decision makers in this country.

 

 

Very interesting. I never thought about it. I don’t sit still much and I have a lot of energy. I used to be a dancer and seriously considered becoming a choreographer, so I think the sense of movement you are describing has more to do with my natural state of being in the world. It’s all about energy. The only time I sit still for long periods of time is when I am writing poems or sleeping.

 

My energy enables me to do a lot of things at once. My dear friend Kwame Alexander who is also a writer, teacher, and publisher; says that this is simply how we do it. It all fits together in the larger world. Now that I am teaching college and writing in other genres, I want to slow down and move less. I want more time for contemplation and writing.

 

I have lived in South Carolina for over twenty years now, but I grew up in Swampscott Massachusetts, which is a little town on the New England coast. The United States is such a huge country, and the south is as different from New England as Italy is from Finland – except that we speak the same language. Everything is different – food, lifestyle, culture, values. I think my background gives me an advantage as a writer. Everything is rather exotic here in the South Carolina Lowcountry. This is a place that lives its history, where everyone is a storyteller, where lemons and tomatoes grow outside the kitchen window. Flowers bloom in our garden year round.  Charleston is one of the most beautiful cities in the country, and despite its troubled past it has always been a major port with an interesting mix of people coming and going. It is endlessly fascinating to me.

 

 

There’s no question that Brooklyn (New York City) is the most unique place I have ever lived. It’s really the only place in the US where I feel completely at home. There’s no place like New York. I love the intensity in the air and the mix of people living there – all the different languages you hear spoken in a given day, all the different cultures that blend together and thrive. I think it has to do with the pace; it suits me and my energy. My husband and I moved there right after we got married and our two oldest sons were born there. We both went to graduate school and worked in New York, and we moved to South Carolina because of a job he was offered in the film business. Now that our sons are all in their twenties, we might even back there one day.

 

Yes, this is an area of interest. The program is called Expressions of Healing – A Visual and Literary Arts Program for Cancer Patients, Survivors and Loved Ones. It meets once a week at Roper/St. Francis Hospital for two eight week sessions/year, and it is free and open to anyone whose life is profoundly impacted by cancer. Most of the participants have never written a poem or done a painting.  Witnessing their creative process is quite extraordinary.  Others often assume that it is painful and difficult to teach people who are in such acute physical and emotional pain.  It is quite the opposite. In fact, it is the most rewarding work I have ever done.

 

One of my favorite stories is about a huge collage that some of the women with breast cancer created on a giant (I mean floor to ceiling) piece of foam core. They noticed how magazines portray women with very long hair and big breasts. Since these women were bald from chemotherapy and had undergone mastectomies, they decided to create a collage out of pictures of particularly voluptuous women with “big hair.” It was all done tongue and cheek, and some of  the pictures were rather risqué. They had a blast making the collage. It hung on the wall of the conference room where we held the workshop for years. One fall we came back and the collage had vanished. I don’t know how someone could have walked out of the hospital with something that huge, but we all joked about it and figured a teenage boy had stolen it or something.

 

 

Publishing is undergoing tremendous changes, and it’s really hard to see how it will all sift out. There are hardly any newspaper book reviewers left, except at places like The New York Times, so the whole nature of promoting books has changed drastically. Publishers aren’t putting as much money into promotion and book tours happen with less frequency. Book PR used to be about cultivating relationships with reviewers and others interested in the kinds of books you published. Now it’s about blogging and twitter and buying front store placement. I teach college now, and I’m lucky that I have another way to make a living.

 

I have so many stories about being a publicist. I have also been a film publicist and worked for Cara White for five years doing press for the PBS series POV and Independent Lens.  I have met so many amazing people along the way. The most memorable book PR stories come from the years I worked for Reader’s International, because so many of the writers were political people and some of them were dissidents. Sometimes these writers were from countries not favored by the US government. Fiction writer, Sergio Ramirez for example, was also the Vice President of Nicaragua during the mid-1980s. The CIA used to call and ask about Mr Ramirez and other authors from Latin America and Eastern Europe in particular. We finally just put the CIA on our review list. Sometimes our phone was tapped.

 

One of the most memorable experiences was going with NPR Cultural Correspondent David Darcy out to Little Haiti in Brooklyn to meet with Haitian writer Pierre Clitandre. Pierre was involved with politics and it was a particularly unstable time in Haiti. We were greeted at the subway station by armed guards with pit bulls on chains and walked to his apartment. They stood behind us as we sat at the kitchen table and did the interview and then walked us back to the subway station when we were through. David and I had never met until the day of the interview. We’ve been friends ever since then.

 

The obligations are few, but I spend at least one full day/week doing poet laureate work.   Composing and reciting a poem at the Governor’s inauguration is probably the only real requirement. There’s no funding, so it is essentially all volunteer work. The honor of the title brings many benefits, of course. In 2003 I co-founded LILA with my friend, poet Carol Ann Davis.  LILA’s mission (Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts) is to nurture and promote the literary arts in South Carolina.  It is dedicated to developing programs that enrich the area’s literary communities and diversifying the opportunities open to students, writers and readers.  It approaches this goal by connecting, educating, and promoting writers (and readers) at every stage of development, from the novice to the professional.

 

LILA has raised over $75,000.00 through grants and fund raisers for a poets-in-the-schools program in Charleston.  We have focused our efforts thus far on Burke High School - the only public high school in downtown Charleston. The student population is over 99% African American.  During the past decades, Burke has suffered from low standardized test scores, faculty and administrative turnovers, low graduation rates, and low teacher, student and faculty morale. We have offered numerous creative writing classes as a way to increase writing and reading skills for students and provide continuing support the newly created Literary Magazine.

I wish we could have a poets-in-the-schools program in every school in SC.

 

Poetry is an unused resource, an art form that is too often overlooked and neglected. It is something we turn to in times of crisis perhaps, but forget during the day-to-day rush of our lives.  But isn’t that when we need poetry more than ever?  I think so.  Poems invite us to slow down and be still, to appreciate everything and everyone around us, to think about what really matters in our lives and the world we live in.  Poems may feel as though they could be about you or someone you know or love.  That’s the point. Poetry is for everyone.

 

Everything belongs in poetry – every human experience and emotion.  There is an intimacy and immediacy in poems that is uniquely powerful and enormously satisfying. Somewhere along the line people are taught to understand poems only through literary devices rather than just responding with their hearts. Poetry has become unavailable to people. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. I think it starts in schools. Textbooks often contain difficult poems with archaic language and syntax that were written hundreds of years ago. These poems intimidate both teachers and students. It seems to me that good contemporary poetry needs to be made available to both students and teachers. There’s so much great poetry being written and published!!

 

When I go into schools, I try to make students think about language in a new way. I want them to simply have fun with words. That’s the best way to begin teaching poetry to anyone! Creative writing engages students completely, because when they use their imaginations, they invest more into the learning process.  Grammar and punctuation skills improve automatically.  Acute attention to language results in accurate expression.  I believe that arts education is a cheap, effective way to improve test scores and academic performance. I think the best way to encourage reading and writing in communities and to improve literacy is to simply incorporate creative writing into the curriculum. It’s a magic bullet every time.

 

 

 

 

 

with winter      there are wounds     impossible

to heal     yet     everything     sings

backwards and blooming     palmetto

and pine     as if grown     from one root

the same green branches          tossing outside

ten curtain less windows     of this seven cornered room

 

 

so many walls     smoke-white     like

scattered clouds      and the same      colored

shelves     stacked to the ceiling

with books     and sunlight

but no explanation for this     loss

 

 

only words     moving across pages

like loud geese     confused

in the winter winds     suddenly

crisscrossing the late afternoon     sky

 

 

 

Tuesday

An orange glow charcoals in the fireplace.  I stare for hours into that fading light, until only ash remains.  Until the telephone shatters the silence.  I know it is my mother calling from the hospital - the place we call our home away from home. My little brother hears the phone ring.   He runs down the stairs.  I grab his hands.  The nails dig into my palms.  I kiss his cheek, the tip of his nose, his head buried on my shoulder.  And then I tell him, "Daddy's gone, he lives in heaven now."  Our arms make tight circles around each other.  Clinging in a flannel heap, we sob.  But he is silent when I whisper-wrap him in prayers and psalms that appear in my memory out of nowhere.

 

I am 14.  My brother is 12.  Now time begins to dilate, while we wait for our mother.   We sit and watch the shadows grow upon the suddenly unfamiliar walls of the living room.  The grandfather clock is still ticking in the corner.  The furnace hums and hums.  Apart from the sounds that the house makes in the night, there is silence.  Finally morning glares through every window.  Little pools of light begin to spread across the carpet.  In my arms, my brother shivers uncontrollably.  His blank blue eyes are frozen to a dark pattern on the rug, unwilling to move and trace the daylight growing beyond the sun's stains.  And I know that he will never again be this child in red faded feet pajamas.

 

Our black and white cat stretches out on the windowsill.  She is watching the garbage men at work.  Their truck sounds like thunder.  Impossible thunder.  My brother and I listen hard.  Distraction. As the men chat, their breath puffs into clouds the color of ash.

 

 

1:38 p.m.

 

Thursday

Each time we answer the echoing doorbells, March winds refresh the crowd; immersed in small-talk, cups of coffee,  tears, and cigarettes.  Smoke mixes easily with the sweetness of the flowers.  Too many flowers.  Lilies, for the season, blanched and blooming in their foil pots, pile up like garbage in the corners of each room.  My Uncle Joe tries too hard to joke:  "We should open up a flower shop."  The laughter in the room reminds me of the make-up caked around my mother's eyes.  Her hands haven't stopped shaking since Tuesday, so she keeps them in her pockets all day - hidden and controlled as stored tears.

 

All the little cousins, dressed-up like mini-aunts and mini-uncles, are playing tag in the basement.  They clatter up and down the stairs whenever they are hurt or hungry.  Karen, who is 4, stops to ask her mother when Uncle John is coming home from the hospital "to

go to his own party."  Aunt Lori shakes her head and says, "Not now Karen, we'll talk about that later."  "Take some cookies, and go back downstairs with your cousins."  My brother overhears and smiles.

 

That night, in a dream, Karen asks him the same question.  He awakens, he remembers.  He cries as quietly as he can into his pillow.

 

4:38 p.m.

 

Thursday

Numbness spreads from room to room, as the house settles into solitude.  Stacks of coffee cups clink together in the whir of the dishwasher.  While my brother and a couple of kids from the neighborhood watch Speed Racer cartoons on television, I vacum-up the cigarette butts and shredded pieces of Kleenex.  My mother is taking a bath, at least that's what her friends told her to do.  I've taken the phone off the hook.  I think I'll scream if I have to hear one more person tell me "Your father was so young," "We're so sorry."  or "Is there anything I can do, dear?"   People don't know what to say.  They're upset and nervous around me.  I know their hearts are in the right place.  I've simply had enough, and I want to be left alone.

 

Soon, it will be night.  I wait.  Standing at the cold fireplace, I watch the windows darken until the streetlights shine their lights upon me.  I bend down, pick up ash, and feel how easily it crumbles into powder.

 

 

 

 

“Out in the yard, a doll without arms, a tricycle with a missing back wheel.

Nothing seemed whole.”

Ron Rash, The World Made Straight

 

A blue tube stretches between

maple trees, like clothesline strung

along the path to the top

of the world.  In spring it will

fill with thick sap and flow

to the sugarhouse below

on its journey from the stars.

At the top of the trail,

two white Adirondack chairs

with hearts carved into their backs

face mountains that ring this town

with impossible snow. Clouds

hide the tallest peaks, above

a sweep of pines flowing

in waves as far as we can see.

Chimney smoke rises, disappears.

House lights glow like candles

flickering on a winter

altar.  In the clearing

at the top of the world,

abandoned cars and tractors

are stuck in ice. Two trailers

hover at the edge of the woods

as if they are waiting for

passengers.  A rocking horse

sits in an orange metal frame

tipping head-first into ice.

In the center of the field;

a gas grill is half buried

in snow. Beside it, the torn

frozen carcass of a deer.

Two sets of coyote tracks lead

into the woods, but the silence

of the missing is the only

sound we hear. It was summer

once, and the waterfalls gushed

white and cold all day long.

At the swimming hole we drank beer,

jumped from cliffs and raced up the trail

to the top of the world. At night

we built bonfires, told stories

filled with lies, and made love

in the back of a hunter’s trailer

while Nirvana sang on the radio.

Occasionally a gun

was fired into the air.

 

 

 

 

 

blue guitar    moon beam

puppy dog     bone     yellow birds

singing     in a cloud

 

 

 

 

 

is the body of this boy I have nursed

through an endless stream of colds,

ear aches, chicken pox – all the germs

passed back and forth between brothers

like Cheerios or Frisbees. Such simplicity.

Stitches beneath the eye, a broken finger,

splinters, sunburns,  jellyfish sting.

Skin so easily ruptured, restitched

in minutes, the ear drum healed,

the throat now healthy and pink

as a rose.  And the body grown

beautiful and strong. But the malleable

mind, rumbling beneath his skull

like a cloud unraveling at the edge

of the sky, is the wound that breaks

this life apart; unnamable, unutterable.

 

 

 

 

 

In the white silence that is winter

return to the river, if only

for solitude. Begin at the roots.

Touch the pulse that keeps

flowing on its own.  Sometimes

you will need only this.

 

For rivers are just a way for us

to find one another. Each rock,

the weight it takes to keep us

here; the fish, just fleeting

friendships, that will disappear

and reappear when we least expect it.

 

Beneath a tangle of trees,

the riverbank is an altar

holding water; the single vessel

taking in miles of spinning leaves,

lost feathers, and the dreams

of all who come here.

 

Now your life belongs to the world.*

Hold fast to everything

beating with sunlight.

Pull us together, like water.

Be the weight that grounds us

through swirling hours of each day.

When voices shout without ceasing,

be the stillness we hear ringing in our hearts.

 

 

(Refers to “The Strength of Fields” By James Dickey)