Welcome to where I am, where my kitchen's always messy, a pot's (or a poet) always about to boil over, a dog is always begging to be fed. Drafts of poems on the counter. Windows filled with leaves. Wind. Clouds moving over the mountains. If you like poetry, books, and music--especially dog howls when a siren unwinds down the hill-- you'll like it here.


MY NEW AUTHOR'S SITE, KATHRYNSTRIPLINGBYER.COM, THAT I MYSELF SET UP THROUGH WEEBLY.COM, IS NOW UP. I HAD FUN CREATING THIS SITE AND WOULD RECOMMEND WEEBLY.COM TO ANYONE INTERESTED IN SETTING UP A WEBSITE. I INVITE YOU TO VISIT MY NEW SITE TO KEEP UP WITH EVENTS RELATED TO MY NEW BOOK.


MY NC POET LAUREATE BLOG, MY LAUREATE'S LASSO, WILL REMAIN UP AS AN ARCHIVE OF NC POETS, GRADES K-INFINITY! I INVITE YOU TO VISIT WHEN YOU FEEL THE NEED TO READ SOME GOOD POEMS.

VISIT MY NEW BLOG, MOUNTAIN WOMAN, WHERE YOU WILL FIND UPDATES ON WHAT'S HAPPENING IN MY KITCHEN, IN THE ENVIRONMENT, IN MY IMAGINATION, IN MY GARDEN, AND AMONG MY MOUNTAIN WOMEN FRIENDS.




Monday, March 21, 2011

POET OF THE DAY: Evie Shockley

I still consider Evie Shockley a North Carolina poet, even though she was born in Tennessee and now teaches at Rutgers. She has strong ties to our state, having taught at Wake Forest University for a number of years and being involved in the Carolina African-American Writers Collective. I came to know her and her work during my stint as Poet Laureate, and she has been one of my favorites ever since.


Evie is the author of four collections of poetry: the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks. Her study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She co-edits the poetry journal jubilat and is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. The following poem is from her new collection, just out from Wesleyan University Press.





my last modernist poem, #4

(or, re-re-birth of a nation)


a clean-cut man brings a brown blackness

to a dream-carved, unprecedented

place. some see in this the end of race,


like the end of a race that begins

with a gun: a finish(ed) line we might

finally limp across. for others,


this miracle marks an end like year’s

end, the kind that whips around again

and again: an end that is chilling,

with a lethal spring coiled in the snow.



___________________________________________



ask lazarus about miracles:

the hard part comes afterwards. he stepped

into the reconstruction of his

life, knowing what would come, but not how.


POET OF THE DAY: Dorianne Laux


Dorianne Laux now lives in Raleigh, NC, where she teaches writing in the NC State graduate writing program. Her most recent book, The Book of Men, was published by WW Norton. Go to her website to find out about her many events and projects.

Smoke

Who would want to give it up,
the coala cat's eye in the dark room, no one there
but you and your smoke, the window
cracked to street sounds, the distant cries
of living things. Alone, you are almost
safe, smoke slipping out between the sill
and the glass, sucked into the night
you don't dare enter, its eyes drunk
and swimming with stars. Somewhere
a Dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws
of a black machine. All down the block
something inside you opens and shuts.
Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,
trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.
You don't flip on the TV or the radio, they
might muffle the sound of car engines
backfiring, and in the silence between,
streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff
of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own,
growing lighter and lighter as you inhale.
There's no music for this scarf of smoke
wrapped around your shoulders, its finger
scrawling the pale stem of your neck,
no song light enough, liquid enough,
that climbs high enough before it thins
and disappears. Death's shovel scrapes
the sidewalk, critches across the man-made
cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters,
digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.
You can hear him weaving his way
down the street, sloshed on the last breath
he swirled past his teeth before swallowing:
breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a woman's
sharp gasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child.
You can't put it out, can't stamp out the light
and let the night enter you, let it burrow through
your infinite passages. So you listen and listen
and smoke and give thanks, suck deep
with the grace of the living, blowing halos
and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains
linking around your head. Then you pull it in
again, the vein-colored smoke,
and blow it up toward a ceiling you can't see
where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,
like the ghost the night will become.



Saturday, March 19, 2011

Franklin Public Library hosts WCU Literary Festival Authors


The Franklin Public Library will host three events celebrating the WCU Literary Festival that occurs during the first full week of April. I will be reading and discussing my book Coming to Rest on Sunday afternoon, March 27 at 2:00. Please go to this link to find more information about these events: http://www.fontanalib.org/pdfs/literary-festival-Franklin-2011.pdf.


Coming to Rest





1.

The Name


Because she’d not bury

the name with the dead child,

she made her surviving five children

swear they’d pass it on

to the first daughter born to them.


Another name for letting go.

Or holding on.


Another name for home.





2.


Birthday Ghazal

Why this old Persian form for today, of all days?

Why not sonnet or blank verse to help me take hold?


Down to the wire goes the season’s gold,

late this year, so long it took to take hold.


I don’t care that my days tumble down

to the compost pile. I want to look, to take hold.


Seize the day. Carpe Diem, if you like.

Bite down hard on the hook and take hold.


Down the creek float the leavings of what I once was.

Just a girl. Mostly waiting for luck to take hold.


Last night rain kept the roof busy scolding

me, wake up you dumb cluck and take hold.


I’ve already answered my e-mail, my voice

mail, my snail mail. My real work? To take hold.


Kathryn died too young. Age twelve. Now she tolls

in the dust of my name: to come back, to take hold.






3.

Sinking


The aunt I was named after died too young.

She sank at age twelve

into diabetic pneumonia. Then coma,


too pretty a word for her dying. Why cling

to another old form like this no-holds-

barred song for my aunt who died too young


to care about romance? What good is a song

now, to her? Or to me? Maybe I’ve grown too old

for such artifice, as if I’m trapped in a coma


of middle-aged dullness. My tongue

slips on names. But not hers. But why dwell

on her death. So she died, much too young,


not all like an angel who could do no wrong,

not at all blonde & pretty as I had been told.

When she sank into that final coma,


she must have looked ugly. I can’t make this

villanelle sing, no matter what I’ve been told

about Kathryn, who died too young,

years before insulin, of diabetic pneumonia.







4.

Stuck


She smoothes her skirt and squints at me.

I don’t know what to say. Or why she’s come.

The clock’s stopped ticking on the wall. Back home

again, she sees what I see, same old creek

reflecting nothing but a sky where trees

fish with their lines of moss all day. Let’s thumb

a ride to town, she dares. Let’s make the phone lines hum

above these droughty fields. Now that I’m free


I’m getting out of here. She says she wants to hear

the latest gossip, wants to have a little fun.

She tells me everything that hangs around

too long gets stuck. I nod. I don’t dare

ask her why she’s here, this dust I’ve stirred from

sleep. This shell of light. This sullen hologram.



5.

Free


This nameless creek

almost obscured by shade

where she was last seen

by the camera lens

keeps rushing through me

as she hikes her skirt

and stands wanting to be

brave enough to walk

into the current,

sickly girl whose cropped

hair won’t blow

in the summer

wind, too short,

too short, she cries,

coming to rest

in the photograph.



Thursday, March 10, 2011

REMEMBERING MARCH WIND THROUGH ORGANDY CURTAINS


March has come in like a lion, blowing the clouds around like sheets on a clothesline. I call up a poem I wrote about remembering my grandmother again and again, her bloomers that swelled with wind on the clothesline, alongside her nightgowns and bedsheets. Her organdy curtains the wind teased when she opened the windows still bloom in my memory.



Again



I lie down in her sea bed that bears

me back home to the nothing left

after her house burned around it.


Her lavender handkerchief knotted

round nickels and dimes. On her dresser

a brooch in the shape of a peacock’s tail.


Organdy curtains that breathed in

and out when she opened the windows

for March to blow through like a lioness


stalking the boxwoods or a lamb bleating

out by the pump house. Her hairpins

sown over the rugs. Her voluminous apron.


Her false teeth that grinned

every night from a tall iced-tea glass

as she pulled off her house dress,


her shimmy, her bloomers

that even now swell like a mainsail with

nothingness. Lorna Doone shortbread


she nibbled till she fell asleep, leaving crumbs

in the bed sheets like sand from the white beach

at Panama City whenever I crawled into bed


with her body that smelled of the ocean

at low tide and tasted of salt

when she pulled me too close to her.


from COMING TO REST

LSU Press Poetry Series, 2006