I can't pick just one – have never been any good at picking one favorite, but what I remember from school is Edgar Allen Poe's “Annabelle Lee.” The music, the story, the feeling I got from that has stayed with me. And I love the sea and write about it a great deal. My last book is Green Daughters, Ovid's term for mermaids, who come in and out of that collection along with poems out of my own life.

When I began to write seriously, I took poetry courses and read a lot of contemporary poets. I fell hard for the book, American Primitive by Mary Oliver and my favorite poem from that book is "Ghosts" about the slaughter of the bison in the west in the 1800’s. I'm now working on poems about the eradication of the wolf after reading Barry Lopez's book, Of Wolves and Men. Powerful!

Another early influence was Jack Gilbert and all of his work. He hits to the heart of all of us, and his love poems are so tender and beautiful. I heard him read at AWP 20 years ago and fell in love myself.

Lastly, and maybe most of all, Stanley Kunitz is the one if I had to pick one. His writing about poetry and his "constellation of images" he says we all have deep in us means everything to me. His book, Passing Through, was the first of his I bought, but now I own all of his poetry collections plus books of interviews with him. I love everything he wrote, “The Snakes of September,” “The Layers,” “The Portrait,” “Wellfleet Whale,” “Raccoon Journal,” – I could go on and on. Love also “The Long Boat.”

 

One other poet I must mention as to who influenced my work. Elizabeth Bishop. She's a master. I'm so taken by her absolute spareness, yet marvelous description and amazing understatement, but deep feeling. I love her love of the sea and living and learning by water in all forms from rivers to rain.

 

Let's see: Process. Well, it varies, but I always start writing a poem in long hand. The poem usually has been ringing in my head for a good while, but once I start writing, it is just a lot of words, no lines, just all that comes to mind as I write on that particular subject. It could have been started by something someone said, some memory, or something I read or another poem that stirs me and gets me thinking, feeling, then writing. Eventually I type it into the computer and start breaking it into lines before I print a first draft.

Revision is everything to me. My early drafts are horrible. Only rarely do I get a “gift” poem that doesn't need lots of work, or many drafts of revision. And I'm in two workshop groups. I usually take a poem to group after I have brought it about as far as I can and feel sort of stalled. Then I see what their reactions are and go back to it again.

It takes me a long time to finish most of my poems. Many times when the poem takes an unexpected turn, then I know I have released control enough for the poem to be what it wants to be. That is a sign that I may not be finished, but I can now move on to something else.

You know, that old saying – a poem is never finished, just abandoned. Or something like that. But the real point is when the poem goes somewhere new, somewhere I never imagined when I started it, then I'm happy.

I would say, first thing that really helps is to connect with other writers. Start where you are, your city or town, your state.

Take a creative writing class from your local college or university. I took writing classes from both a university near me and at my city community college. If you don't want to enroll as part-time student, take the continuing ed. enrichment classes. They may be found in community centers, too.

If you have already taken these writing classes in college, connect with other poets in your community through the local & statewide writers organizations. I joined the Charlotte Writers Club, the North Carolina Writers Network, and the N.C. Poetry Society. I also joined a poets' workshop group early on. We formed that group to meet on a twice-monthly basis after taking a class that had ended and some of us wanted to keep meeting. Later I joined another group. Both have sustained me and helped my poems to find the right path. The other participants react and suggest, and I take it in and let it settle, then work some more.

Go to writers conferences and retreats in the summer. They are all over the map and very helpful. Check out what seems best for your needs.

Read, read, read. Read other poet's books and collections. Read poetry journals. Read articles in the poetry journals and magazines and subscribe to some of them.

Last, but not at all the least piece of advice, is have a “thick skin.” Take whatever critique comes your way. Let it roll off or sink in, but think about it. When you send your work out for submission, learn to expect rejection. Then if it comes back, you will see the poems in a new light, with fresh eyes. Revision is re-seeing. Work on them again, send them out again. And when you find the right publication with the right editor for your work, it's a great day. I felt gratified when Connotation Press accepted my poems and had such good things to say about them, a great day for me.

So glad you asked this question. The form is based on the nursery rhyme, “The House that Jack Built.” For me at least, there seems to be a tradition of poems of pain and dread written by women poets after this rhyme. Over the years, I came upon them individually. There is Anne Sexton's poem “The Bell” – I believe it's titled. It concerns her time when she was committed to the hospital for the mentally ill. It starts with “This is the nurse who rings the bell that....” And so on. Here at the beach, I'm away from my books with these poems in them.

 

Then Elizabeth Bishop wrote “Visits to St. Elizabeth’s” which is about her visiting Ezra Pound while she was poet in residence at the Library of Congress in D.C., and Pound was in D.C. committed to that hospital for the insane. Her poem starts something like, “This is the man....” And so on.

 

Lastly, I came across Jane Cooper's stunning poem, “The House That Fear Built.” It's about a boy in Warsaw in WWII. These are all magnificent poems and very powerful. I dared to try to follow in their steps.

As to the 2nd part of your question, my poem concerns both a universal horror and a murder trial I read about in the newspaper. A comment about both mothers attending the trial, sitting across the aisle from each other, broke my heart. I felt so sorry for both of them and for all mothers with all our trials, but I hoped we could all be spared that ultimate horror that some are not. So that's what the “tokens” and the “troll” are symbols of at the end of “This.”

Oh, Joani, the older I get.... Your question reminds me of the poems I've been reading these last years by older poets, men and women. Stephen Dunn, Jack Gilbert (who in spite of rumored dementia continued to write the finest poems about beauty and joy in all of this pain and decay), the amazing Ruth Stone, Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, and Charlotte's own wonderful Julie Suk, who at 87 keeps on writing masterful, but deeply grave poems.

 

My own writing almost never starts this way, but may take that fateful turn and end or branch off into the future where death waits and I consider the mystery of that certainty.

 

As is often said, all poems are about love and death. And what could be more grand? And speaking of grand, that is, as you have so wisely perceived, what did happen as I wrote of the birth of my first grandchild. I think I used the word stunned in that poem. I think that says it all. I was stunned with joy, stunned with mortality.

 

It is truly amazing how you can throw a rock in North Carolina and hit a writer. Maybe it started with the goodly number of academic institutions. Colleges and universities are all over the state. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the center with many fine branches spread over the state from the coast to the mountains. Right in that same Raleigh/Durham area, there's Duke University, N.C. State, Peace College, St. Mary's & Merideth College there for women & N.C. Central that draws mostly African-Americans.

 

Of course, over time, many of the women’s colleges now have men & women attending and all races attend all the colleges these days, I'm happy to say. Here in my area, there is UNC Charlotte, Queens University, Central Piedmont Community College and Davison College close by and Salem College not far up the highway. And these all have been around for many generations of North Carolinians, some established in the 1700’s. These places attract very fine professors and teachers who write. And attract writers who teach, but maybe the most special thing that writers notice about N.C. writers is a spirit of generosity.

 

“Pass it on” was the phrase that I heard early on at a N.C. Writers Network Conference I attended more than twenty yrs. ago. It's a quote from the fine fiction novelist, Doris Betts. It is really true.

 

When I joined the N.C. Poetry Society, the State Poet Laureate, Sam Ragan, greeted me, introduced himself, and said, “Send me a poem.” And every Poet Laureate we have had since has been just as generous in encouraging poets all over the state and in shining a light on our work. This reaching out to welcome new writers to the state and to our writing groups started at the state levels and continues at the local levels of community writing groups. It's a North Carolina tradition that goes a long way back and is very alive today.

 

 

 

–After "The House That Jack Built"

 

is the mother of that

young man who did

those things to that girl

found in the sand

by the river under the bridge

 

did this mother dress the boy in navy

and white a boy with almost

all A's the teacher's praise his book

bag tidy his bike shiny

 

isn’t this the woman who buried

the canary let out

of its cage by that

same boy who played

 

with strays  the woman

who found the cat curled

and still under

the pillow under

the sill who didn’t

 

spot the blood

under his nails turning

her head at what

the cop said

 

what

of the other

mother who ribboned

hair and buckled shoes

all polished and red of that

small girl who spilled

 

juice over the table

down her legs this

mother who scolded

that girl before

she played in front yard

 

shade in sand that stuck

to her legs  before

the car with that nice

young man

 

who

is the red-eyed troll

under the bridge

who waves to us

pass over  pass over

 

 

 

OCTOBER GRANDDAUGHTER


 

The night you are born, after the long

hour before breath moves warm

and easy in your rosy lungs,

 

your grandfather and I sit on the porch,

stunned, listening to autumn's crickets hum

with the heat of their final hurrahs.

 

Your dad appears, leaving you, your mom

and her mom clustered like a set of Russian dolls.

We toast – the men busy with cigars,

 

laughing at nothing, not caring that the air

grows cold. At the end

of his visit, your dad turns at the gate,

 

one of us. Leaving the night

we follow the moon’s milk light

 

across oak boards through dark

cluttered with easy chairs and books

we've lived in too long and not long enough.

 

 

 

THE DOOR

 

 

A gauzy haze of stark surprises –

door swinging wide to wheeling

gurneys, strangers entering to touch

and turn my mother’s papery body.

Sent to wait in the hall, I heard,

 

as they snipped, then wrapped

a leg now ended mid-thigh.

She napped and talked –

 

Once, Let me wear your rings a while.

 

She slipped them on, held a veined hand

above the sheets to look, gave the rings back.

The question forever unasked – had she lost

her wedding ring, the gold gone

before my time, or did my father not give

 

what others had offered? One grinding

night, she recalled the tree

that spilled small crosses over

our second story window –I paid a dollar

for the sapling that boy called a pink dogwood.

 

Finally, it was my brother she called for;

first born, gentler, more patient,

soft-eyed with wide square hands,

someone any of us might want beside us

when the door next opens.

 

 

 

Andy, Andy, his Jackies, Marilyns, comics

and green stamps, the animals saved

 

from extinction by slashes

of red, blue, yellow – the zebra a rainbow

 

of lines – after ghostly screens, print

and film – a world of mirrors, everyone drawn

 

through smoke out of all that he unmasked. Coded

versions of the Last Supper, his last work –

 

an alchemy of Eucharist and secular, stenciled

and hand-painted – Christ with Dove soap,

 

a rosy bird hovering, three disciples circled

by GE’s blue logo. Death stamps the work

 

unfinished, left in Elvis’s shadow, in shades

of hibiscus unbound by stem or vase, a garden

 

floating on curves of color. Freed from

wither or ruin, petals and heads disembodied,

 

the blossoms move beyond any frame

and anyone who reaches to touch.