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.




Sunday, January 22, 2012

Southern Fictions: Coda




After I'd completed my "Southern Fictions" sonnet sequence back in the late 90's, I wrote what I considered a coda.   It grew out of the memory of my grandmother telling me when, as a young girl, I asked her whether I was Democrat or Republican.  I think we might  have been watching the t.v. they had just bought, and a news program was on.  I knew nothing of the two parties then.   By now I know too much.  And after watching the SC Republican primary's race-baiting and seeing how successful it was, I know that little has changed.  I never attached this coda to the sonnets, but after Gingrich's win, thanks, let's face it, to his race-baiting, I feel like sharing it.   This is the first time I've shown it to anyone but my husband.





Democrat or Republican, 
I asked in childhood, can 
you tell me which I  am ?  
A Democrat, she slammed
the word down hard.  And don’t
you ever dare forget it. 
And I haven’t.  I regret to mention
 that the most of my relations
have.  Blame civil rights.
Afraid to do the right
thing, they turned right
and lost the moral high
ground.  Elected bigots
and  were proud of it.

Monday, January 16, 2012

CONTINUING TO EXCAVATE OUR SOUTHERN PAST




On Martin Luther King day, I remember a poem I began on a drive several years ago from Selma to Montgomery.  It first appeared in Crab Orchard Review's special issue on Southern writing.

How do we keep the memory of those times alive?   Maybe by re-examining and excavating our own memories and sharing them?  Even though they may be powder-kegs, frighteningly explosive if we come too close to them.

This poem will be in my new collection, Descent, due from LSU Press in early fall of 2012.  



What I See Now


I see yucca and winter stubble along
their route, now and then markers 
noting the sites where they camped,
singing hymns, keeping watch as the Ancient
Ones do in the Bibles they carried.

I take note of hay bales like those 
I grew up seeing everywhere,
Billy’s Tire Center crumbling to nothing
beside a small graveyard with plastic blooms
bled now to white from the weather.

Montgomery waits straight ahead,
looking these days  like everywhere else.
Wal-Mart.  Home Depot. 
Driving through downtown,
we tick off the fast-food chains.
Why not MacDonald’s?  We order

our coffee to go.  Senior
discount.  The girl at the register
rings it up, looking no older than
seventeen, her story holding
not much left of what happened

here
forty years ago.
Blue eyes,
I notice.  Stark
purple eye shadow. 


*


My best friend at Finishing School,
as we  called it while lifting
our lily-white pinkies
and pursing our lips for effect,
came from Selma, 
a beauty queen born late
to parents who asked that their only child
not room with anyone whose shade
of iris bloomed darker than blue.   

Smoking cigarettes, bold in the parking lot,
we watched a regiment of frat men
in Rebel duds raising  the Bonnie Blue Flag
while their girlfriends stood swaying
in hoop skirts: a squadron of cheerleaders
urging them onward, their brave drunks, 
defenders of white Southern womanhood.

Meanwhile her mother was driving
across the state line with a black woman
kept in the back seat to mind
many layers of pink lace and satin,
arriving in time for the ball-gown
to be lifted out  and ironed ever so carefully 
down in the basement where 

those not invited to Mayday
Ball, rapt as an ashram
of wannabe’s, inhaled
our Salem's right down
to the filter and exhaled
our smoke rings,
observing them hang 
in the singed air like ghosts 
before fading away. 




*




Spanish moss hung, 
my friend later told me,
from phony live oaks round the dance floor
while black waiters served phony champagne
(no alcohol  within a 50 mile radius lest
we  be banished, forevermore losing
our chance to be “finished”
like fine crystal ready to be rung

by just the right finger.).
My friend’s gown came back
splashed with whiskey, a stain 
that could never be washed from its pink
satin bodice. My friend did not come back
the next year.  She transferred to Birmingham
Southern.  I wonder what she saw

with those bonnie eyes when the 16th Street
Baptist Church blew, and the little girls pulled
from the rubble lay finished
beyond comprehension, 
their role in this story I see now
as being a stubble field 
close to the edge

of an altered state
line I’m still
trying to cross
with an old
roadmap wrinkled
as yesterday’s
pink satin
inside my skull.



                                       

Sunday, January 1, 2012

OLD LETTERS FOR THE NEW YEAR




  


Here's a Language Matters Column from several years back.  It still speaks to me, and I hope to you, as well.
NEW YEAR'S EVE SUNSET
   
Happy New Year!

Old Letters for the New Year 
By Kathryn Stripling Byer 


Lately, my brother and I have been exploring the contents of the attic in the house where we 
grew up. We greeted this new year without my father’s presence, and perhaps that is why we 
have felt so drawn to what remains of our ancestors whose books, letters, journals, and articles of 
clothing rest in the attic like relics. 

We found century-old letters from our great-grandparents and one letter from a great-great- 
grandfather writing from County Clare, Ireland, in 1869, telling his son Will how proud he 
would always be of him. We found another from his daughter, Nell, speaking of our great- 
grandfather’s childhood and early manhood, written to his wife, my great-grandmother Ella 
Valentine Fry, after her husband’s death. My great-grandmother was quite a letter-writer herself, 
educated well enough to become a teacher at age 16 in the Lead City, South Dakota schools, the 
first female so “nominated” to that post. My brother and I unfolded each of these letters as if 
they were the most precious items in the house. Each one was written with care, the handwriting 
graceful, the language itself literate in both style and grammar. These letters obviously mattered 
a great deal to both the authors and the recipients. Now, more than a century later, they speak to 
us in ways we’ve only begun to appreciate. 

Who among us writes letters like this anymore, I wondered, as I read the words that flowed from 
those long-ago pens, the ink fading, but the language still vibrant? Whose handwriting could 
match theirs? Not mine. I type my letters, my handwriting increasingly unreadable and hurried. 
Or, like more and more of us, I email my correspondence. With the click of a mouse, I send my 
messages. I do not labor with a dip pen to put into durable words my love for a child gone to the 
new world to become a miner in South Dakota. My messages are nothing like the letters we 
found by a sister writing across the Atlantic about her dead brother’s love of tools and 
engineering. Like so many of us, I am in a hurry. My correspondence is fleeting, disposable. 
Most of it will be deleted. 

In his poem “Please Write: Don’t Phone,” Robert Watson, my former teacher in the UNC-G 
writing program, exhorts, “Let us write instead: surely our fingers spread out / With pen on paper 
touch more of the mind’s flesh.” He explains, “I can touch the paper you touch,” and “I can read 
you day after day.” His last lines continue to haunt me: “I hold the envelope that you addressed 
in my hand. / I hold the skin that covers you.” 

In this new year of email and instant-messaging, few seem to have time to sit down and put their 
lives onto paper that can be unfolded again and again, or placed in a drawer for safe-keeping. 
The flesh of my family’s past resides in those yellowing sheets of paper we found in the attic. I 
carry their words into the new year, resolved to write more letters in long-hand, letting the words 
rise slowly to the surface and take shape on the empty page like a gift to be cherished. 

FRY FAMILY GRAVESTONE, CORBALLY CHURCHYARD, IRELAND