Poetry of the People featuring Cynthia Francis

This week's Poet of the People is Cynthia Francis. 

I met Cynthia through poet, Jane Zenger. She is a newly retired educator busy finding her voice through poetry. There is no ambiguity or trying to decide what she means; her poetry is refreshingly direct and unapologetically to the point. Zealous to hone her craft, she can be found actively participating in poetry readings and workshops. I look forward to her future involvement and development in our poetry community.

Al Black

Cynthia Francis began her teaching career at the Fort Jackson Schools 39 years
ago. She started as a second-grade teacher, then moved to pre-kindergarten, and
ended her career teaching kindergarten. She served on several committees and
organizations during her professional career. Chairperson for Professional
Development Schools with the University of South Carolina. Chairperson of the School
Improvement Council/Committee, President of the Fort Jackson Association of
Educators, Chairperson/Organizer of Multicultural Project at Pinckney Elementary
School. Member of Who’s Who, and Former President of SCECA(South Carolina Early
Childhood Association). She has recently supervised interns for the USC College of
Education.

Redone

Stop living in the shadow of memories,
plucking out pieces of sentiment
capturing thoughts and triggering emotions.
Stop dwelling in the spirit
relevant to feelings.
Life doesn’t come with guarantees.
You’re just a being
needing to make a stance.
Sometimes, you have to take a chance.
Just listen to the quiet!
It’s like the world stops
at the end of the day.
You, in your space,
moving towards a place.

____

Love Finds You

Love finds you when you’re never looking.
It sees you from the inside.
Things unseen,
no one watches for
through the quietness
which tells it all.
Listen carefully to unspoken words,
it lets you know the strength
and fortitude of your worth.
Love finds you when you’re never looking.
Connects the wrong,
yet, gives the sense you belong.
Half the duo, silent and strong.
A heart-filled love, free from loneliness
someone who shares, no more emptiness.
A life that cares, no broken promises.
Love’s a sanctuary gathers forth
a restless spirit from within
and brings peace which smoothly transcends.
Love finds you when you’re never looking.
It sees you from the inside,
a subtle moment catches like fireworks
then later subsides.
Love is everlasting, never-ending.
It ebbs and flows until time ends.
Love finds you.
It sees you from the inside
when you’re never looking.

____

Life

Life is a full circle.
Each day brings opportunities to learn,
grow from the past.
Memories are not to be ghosted,
put in jars, placed on shelves,
become forgotten, only to reinvent themselves
in the future as unwanted guests.
Life itself does not have an expiration date.
The idea of living holds tremendous weight.
Stand up, hold tight
living is not quite dead yet.
There’s still light.
With living comes discomfort, mess, discord, stress.
It also reminds you of those hard times
that leads to your best moments.
Life can express itself in the shadows of comfort
while pulling to the present those feel-good pleasures of self
connected to others in memories.
Joys shared, actions delivered, show we care,
relaxed in the company kept.
Life is a full circle,
but we allow it to slip away.
We give time the upper hand.
One side of the hourglass is full of sand.
We can’t recover, can’t reuse.
can only make new the time we have now,
so, let’s use until it’s gone.

____

Too Much

They moved shows from the stage
brought raggedy selves in our faces.
Tails throbbing, hips bobbing,
words flirting, asses twerking.
Someone shouting, “Back it up, gal!”
Everyone’s talking nonsense.
All done in constant pursuit
to screw consumers
of their dollars and cents.
Fill their drawers with lingerie,
bribe young girls to cover their lips
with filthy named gloss
cosmetic stores won’t sell.
Put your name out there, show who’s the boss.
Your name on the latest perfume,
that’s how you can sell it.
Nothing soothes the soul like being told you’re at the top.
At some point, this bullshit has to stop!


You're Invited to the 1st Launch Party & Reading of Ed Madden's new book of poetry -- Story of a City: poems occasional and otherwise - Saturday September 23rd, 6 pm, 1013 Duke Avenue

Please join Muddy Ford Press and friends and family of former Columbia city poet laureate Ed Madden for a launch party for his new book of poetry, Story of a City: poems occasional and otherwise, published by Muddy Ford Press.

Saturday, September 23rd

6 pm

1013 Duke Avenue

In addition to hearing Ed read from his new collection of poems written in his role as city poet laureate, Ed has invited some special guests to read as well.

And there will be cake!

Books are $20 and will be available for purchase at the event or, prior to the event at Amazon, Barnes & Noble dot com, Booktopia, and more.

Cover Artist is Steven Chesley.

1013 Duke Avenue is located up North Main Street by turning left on Arlington. Parking is available in the designated lot across the street.

Ed Madden is the author of five books and four chapbooks of poetry, most recently A pooka in Arkansas, which was selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, and Ark, a book about his father’s last months in hospice care. He is a professor of English and the former director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches Irish literature, queer studies, and creative writing. Ed served as the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, SC, 2015-2022. He is recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and artist residencies at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and the Instituto Sacatar in Itaparica, Brazil.

Fall Lines 2023-2024 Submissions Are Open with a New Format and a New Award!

Fall Lines – a literary convergence is a literary journal presented by The Jasper Project in partnership with Richland Library and One Columbia for Arts and History.

Fall Lines will accept submissions of previously unpublished poetry, essays, short fiction, and flash fiction from April 15, 2023 through July 31, 2023.

ENTER FALL LINES 2023

While the editors of Fall Lines hope to attract the work of writers and poets from the Carolinas and the Southeastern US, acceptance of work is not dependent upon residence. Publication in Fall Lines will be determined by a panel of judges and accepted authors will be notified by December 31, 2023, with a publication date in early 2024. This year we are offering three cash prizes of $250 each. The Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose sponsored by the Richland Library Friends and Foundation as well as the Combahee River Prize which will be awarded to a SC writer of color in either poetry or prose.

See last year’s winners and contributors.

2023 Entries

After filling out the submission form you will receive an email with instructions for submitting your work.

Poetry

  • Up to 5 poems may be submitted in a SINGLE WORD FILE.

  • No single poem should exceed four 6 x 9-inch pages

New This Year- To ensure the integrity of the poet’s spacing, it is best that poems be formatted to appear on a 6 x 9-inch page with I-inch margins. If submitted in a larger format, we cannot guarantee your poem will be printed with the spacing you desire
We have created a template that should make this easier: Fall Lines Poetry Submissions Template

Prose

  • Up to 5 prose entries may be submitted in a SINGLE WORD FILE.

  • Entries should be 2500 words or less

ALL ENTRIES SHOULD BE TITLED.

There is no fee to enter, but submissions that fail to follow the above instructions will be disqualified without review.

Simultaneous submissions will not be considered. Failure to disclose simultaneous submissions will result in a lack of eligibility in any future Jasper Project publications.

 __

 The Columbia Fall Line is a natural junction, along which the Congaree River falls and rapids form, running parallel to the east coast of the country between the resilient rocks of the Appalachians and the softer, more gentle coastal plain.

POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE OF UKRAINE - Premonition by Ellen Malphrus

This poem originally appeared in Fall Lines - a literary convergence volume VII-VIII

Premonition: January 2, 2020

by Ellen Malphrus

 

A castover hush of a day.

 

White tulips bend

to where there is no sun

as the dog naps

and the cat naps harder.

Little winter birds flit and flash,

awakened now from their own

long morning quiet

as a flicker drills at an oak.

The low growl of a Sunday plane

drifts back into silence and

the miles-away road buzz

goes entirely un-hummed.

 

I have lit a candle against the bleakness  

but why it seems like gloom

I cannot say.

 

Here on the cusp of the oncoming

year of perfect vision

maybe I’m afraid of

what I might see,

what I might not see.

 

Today I’d rather lie here in the porch swing

with my eyes closed

and listen to the dog snore,

the heedless woodpecker laughing.

You’re invited to share your poems and prose, dedicated to peace in Ukraine, with the Jasper Project.

Send to editor@JasperProject.com

Featured Fall Lines Contributor -- Glenis Redmond

My poems come from my core. Then, I pour what percolates onto journal pages. They are hot-inked scribblings, handwritten epiphanies that morph and manifest into soul driven colloquial anthems. My poems stand up – sing and dance of lineage or lack thereof. They come from a deep-seated oceanic need to know about my heritage. What I cannot answer, I imagine. - Glenis Redmond

Glenis Redmond performs spoken word poetry as the Keynote Speaker for the Greer SC Arts Council

In January, the JASPER PROJECT released a combined double issue of volumes VII and VIII of Fall Lines - a literary convergence, our annual literary journal. In the weeks to come we will be highlighting some of the contributions to the journal by featuring the author and their work in ONLINE JASPER.

This week, we’re featuring one of South Carolina’s treasured poets, Glenis Redmond.

A 2020 recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts and an upcoming inductee into the SC Academy of Authors, Redmond considers herself a poet, a teaching artist, and an imagination artist. From her website we learn that, “Glenis Redmond is nationally renowned award-winning poet and teaching artist traveling the world sharing and teaching poetry. She writes about the strength of her Afro-Carolinian roots, while exploring their weighted and palpable histories. Glenis is a literary community leader. She is dedicated to coaching and uplifting youth poet’s voices. She co-founded a literary program called Peace Voices in her hometown of Greenville, SC from 2012-2019. Glenis is also  Kennedy Center Teaching Artist and a Cave Canem poet.

Her work has been showcased on NPR and PBS and  has been most recently published in Orion Magazine, the North Carolina Literary Review, Obsidian Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, StorySouth, About Place and Carolina Muse

She has recently won awards for her poems featuring Harriet Tubman (conductor of the (Underground Railroad) Harriet Jacobs (enslaved woman who hid in attic 7 years to escape her owner, then turned abolitionist and writer) and Harriet E. Wilson (first African American novelist). These poems will be published in Glenis’ upcoming chapbook, The Three Harriets and Others  by Finishing Line Press in 2021.  Her latest book, The Listening Skin will be published by Four Way Books in 2022. 

During February 2016, at the request of U.S. State Department for their Speaker's Bureau, Glenis traveled to Muscat, Oman, to teach a series of poetry workshops and perform poetry for Black History Month.

In 2014-18, Glenis has served as the Mentor Poet for the National Student Poet's Program to prepare students to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House. The students now read at the Library of Congress. 

Author and T&W Board member Tayari Jones selected Glenis Redmond’s essay, “Poetry as a Mirror,” as the runner-up for the 2018 Bechtel Prize. Teachers & Writers Collaborative awards the annual Bechtel Prize to the author of an essay that explores themes related to creative writing, arts education, and/or the imagination.  

Redmond’s “Dreams Speak: My Father’s Words” was chosen for third place for the North Carolina Literary Review’s James Applewhite Prize and “Sketch,” “Every One of My Names,” and “House: Another Kind of Field” will be published in NCLR in 2019. These poems are about —Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the underground railroad; Harriet Jacobs, who escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist, and the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Harriet E. Wilson, who was held as an indentured servant in the North and went on to become an important novelist, businesswoman, and religious speaker.

Glenis believes that poetry is a healer, and she can be found in the trenches across the world applying pressure to those in need, one poem at a time.  

Visit Glenis at www.glenisredmond.com 

She Makes Me Think of Houses

For Ruth Noack

I.

I lived in many house. 13 by age 13.

This year, I circle back to my first.

The place where I was born: Sumter, South Carolina.

My birth certificate classifies me: Negroid.

On Shaw AFB. My sister Velinda

7 years my elder cannot attend the school on base.

My father writes a letter to the base commander

for his first daughter to attend.

She’s her own version of Ruby Bridges

Unescorted. Chased by white boys with sticks.

Everyday called, Nigger.

II.

This year I drive 2 ½ hours South

to take my grandson, Julian

to a family fun day

on a black-run horse farm.

We both ride on a horse named, Blue.

Julian’s favorite color.

Bessie Smith sings the hue.

On the way back home,

I see a sign to my birthplace.

I tell Julian I want to drive by.

Visit 57 years later.

Apartments. Projects. Hood.

Sub-standard housing,

a crack-riddled man stumbles towards us.

I have eyes all over my body

I assess the cracked windows

and duct taped doors.

Two dark-skinned girls play

in the street. Double Dutch.

I tell Julian to stay in the car.

I take pictures.

When I tell my daughter

I went there: 45 Birnie Circle.

She says, “This house, not home

does not define you.”

X marks my port of entry.

I see all the angles.

Drive back to my home on Endeavor Circle.

Purchased with poetry money.

I’ve indeed come full circle ‘round.

 

Remembering Thorne Compton, with Thoughts of Peace and Love by Dale Bailes

photo courtesy of Chris Compton

photo courtesy of Chris Compton

Thorne Compton and I met at U of SC in the early sixties. We were on the Junior Varsity, of the Debate Team. We made a mutual friend of Bob Anderson, and did our best to make this first black male student at USC feel welcome. That was an uphill battle in those days. I lost track of Bob after I left grad school in 1965; Thorne kept track and even told me of being in touch with Bob’s widow and child in recent years. 

Thorne and I met again in the early seventies. He had done a stint in the Peace Corps with first wife Jo; I had been a hippie mail man in San Francisco, among other West Coast Adventures. 

Those adventures led to my pulling together a crew of artists, Viet Nam vets, and singers and seamstresses to open the Joyful Alternative. Thorne was a regular there at our original 2009 Green Street location, stopping in for a record or a book every week, and papers. THE VILLAGE VOICE and GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, that is. 

Thorne managed to function in the academic environs better than I had. He earned a doctorate and became an English professor. When I published my first book CHERRY STONES and went to work with the Arts Commission, he invited me to do poetry readings for his classes. He would go on to deanships and department chairs. 

I pursued other interests—running a music hall at Folly Beach, getting an MFA in Screenwriting at USC/West. I taught in prisons and on Navy ships, and a planned two-year gig as an adjunct at Moorpark College in California ending up being twenty-five or thirty years. 

At one point in the eighties, Thorne got in touch to make sure I got the scoop on Carolina’s big celebration of James Dickey.  He got me in, and I was privileged to see and hear such literati as Harold Bloom and John Simon hold forth. 

It must have been about that time I began to make an effort to find a full-time teaching job SOMEWHERE, and I made yet another request of the most stolid academic friend I knew for a letter of recommendation. 

He must have written a dozen letters, without complaint. 

Until I was visiting in Columbia from California in the early nineties and ran into him at the campus bar Hunter-Gatherer. After some catch-up conversation over a beer or three, he blurted out in faux exasperation—I think—“Please don’t ask me to write anymore ________________ letters of recommendation!” 

I didn’t. 

I spent a few more years adjuncting at Moorpark until I got tired of freeways, and retired to live with my best friend Jo Baker at Pawleys Island.  Thorne, having lost his Jo years earlier, was remarried, retired, and removed to Michigan for several years. 

The odds were long that two old friends would meet again at the top of the hill where Saluda meets Heyward , but it happened. About two years ago. 

I stopped at the sign and waited for a man and his dog, motioning them to go ahead. 

Thorne and his dog Bo weren’t taking any chances, so I rolled down the window when Thorne looked closer to check my plans. Two happy old codgers, I guess we seemed to any passersby. And although Bo tugged on the leash and whimpered about having more peemail to check, we caught up a bit. I was on my way home from  my work at U of SC School of Nursing, where I occasionally was a Standardized Patient.  

He didn’t know the term. I explained I portrayed scenarios of different illness situations, with student nurses.  The irony was thick as he managed a smile and said, “I’m the real thing.” He had months, or maybe a couple years, left. 

We ended our car window conversation with a promise to get together soon for a nice bottle of red, and lots of “telling lies.” 

My personal lethargy, isolation at Pawleys, the pandemic…it didn’t happen. Most of us have made the same mistake. 

Thorne’s son Chris Compton messaged me from Los Angeles that if I was going to see him again, it should be sooner rather than later.  Thorne’s wife Raven was kind enough to arrange a visit with him the week before Easter. 

Even without a good red, we had a very good hour. We talked about Bob Anderson, the early days of Joyful, those letters of recommendation. He smiled and mentioned a memory that surprised me. “Those parties on South Walker Street. Live music and a hundred of your closest friends. Some of the best times I ever had!” 

As usual, he asked what I was writing, I told him an artist named Janet Kozachek had provided two pieces of work that had inspired some ekphrastic poems. New as the term was to me, he remembered learning it a dozen years ago. I told him I would send the art and the poems.  

I don’t know if he was able to see the stuff before he passed. One of them, with the artwork that inspired it used with the artist’s permission, is printed below. The poem, “Obeisance,” has a puckish tone that I associate with Thorne Compton, and is dedicated to his memory. As is the next glass of red I wrap my hand around.

Artist - Janet Kozachek

Artist - Janet Kozachek

OBEISANCE

  by Dale Bailes

The posture is apotropaic.

To appease Thanatos, back when.

And now to fend off his vengeful

Sibling, Erinyes.

 

It is not a conscious thing.

It is brought forth by naked fear

As pandemic stalks the land.

The gesture is archaic, bold.

 

Bare haunches taunt our oldest

Dread.  They show contempt

For knowing time is never

Long enough, nor safety certain.

 

What I create may have

A longer span. A gesture, small,

To thwart some master plan.

A wrench in the machine.

 

So. Black-robed, grinning bearer

Of the scythe—or shrieking sister

Eris—bring forth your deadly kiss.

I here present, a target you can’t miss.

 

 

Retired English instructor Dale A. Bailes commutes from the ‘hood in Pawleys to the ‘wood in Columbia for his part-time work as a Standardized Patient at the U of SC School of Nursing. He has poems upcoming in Fall Lines and AMERICAN WRITERS REVIEW.

Columbia Poets Al Black and Randy Spencer Featured in Piccolo Spoleto’s Sundown Poetry Series

Al Black and Randy Spencer are effervescent poets, speakers who refuse to hold back or look away from what asks to be gazed upon. In their work, readers are taken on a journey of intertwining rivers where you learn about their histories, intimate parts of yourself, and the spaces and places in which we dwell. Keep reading to learn more about Piccolo Spoleto’s Sundown Poetry Series and Black and Spencer—and discover two poems from the artists. 

Former Charleston Mayor Joe Riley launched Piccolo Spoleto in 1979, two years after Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA. Piccolo, alluding to the smallest woodwind and thus the smaller festival within the larger Spoleto, has reflected the City of Charleston’s desire to showcase local art and artists. 

The Sundown Poetry Series is one of the oldest events in Piccolo history, with the goal of featuring a select number of local poets. The current selection committee consists of Ed Gold, Katherine Williams, and Curtis Derrick. According to Derrick, the application process for poets parallels the process for all Piccolo Spoleto artists and is based on a submission of work. At times, however, the selection committee directly invites applications from poets who have “achieved particular notoriety or had recent book publications.”  

The original venue for the Sundown Series was the courtyard at the Dock Street Theater—so drama patrons could enjoy poetry as an art “appetizer” before a performance—but this year Sundown is being held in the Lenhardt Garden of the Gibbes Museum of Art to accommodate more efficient social distancing. 

Eight poets are being featured this year, one per evening, in the following order: Al Black, Valerie Nieman, H.R. “Randy” Spencer, Lola Haskins, Dr. David B. Axelrod, Kwoya Fagin Maples, Grace C. Ocasio, and Ren Ruggiero—two of the poets, Black and Spencer, are Columbia-based. 

Al Black has published two poetry collections: I Only Left for Tea (2014) and Man with Two Shadows (2018), both with Muddy Ford Press. He co-edited Hand in Hand, Poets Respond to Race (2017) and has been published in several anthologies, journals, periodicals, and blogs. He hosts various arts events, co-founded the Poets Respond to Race Initiative, and was Jasper Project’s 2017 Literary Artist of the Year. 

Black expresses anticipation for the reading—while often not the type to seek out readings and more so the one to host them, he deeply enjoys being a part of them. Derrick reached out to Black in 2019 and asked if he would be interested in reading for Sundown, and Black accepted and was slated for 2020, but when the festival was cancelled due to COVID-19, the poets were moved to 2021. 

Spencer was also originally slated to read in 2020 and is looking forward to reading this week. H.R. “Randy” Spencer is the author of several chapbooks, and his first full collection, The Color After Green, was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. As stated on Piccolo Spoleto’s Facebook, “Recently featured on SCETV’s By the River, this collection of contemporary nature poems is both personal and reaches for larger concerns around climate and ecological changes, sometimes set in the South Carolina Lowcountry.”

Spencer previously read as part of the Sundown Series in 2012 and had such a positive experience that, after the required waiting period between reapplying, he immediately applied to read again. “I don’t do many readings, and my favorite are small groups where we can sit and talk,” he divulges, “I’m looking forward to sharing my work with whoever comes.”   

Spencer says that he will start off the reading with poems from his collection but will mix up what he reads to fit this event. “I change it up due to where I am,” he shares, “Since it’s in Charleston, I’ll do more poems that have to do with the coast and the low country and traveling.”  

He will also read outside the book, reading some books from a chapbook of poems about the COVID-19 pandemic. He also recently wrote a poem in the Gullah language as a means to preserve and honor the lyrical language, and he hopes to read it during the event as well. 

Black also likes to switch readings up based on where he is performing. He will have the time it takes to read a work at the top of each poem’s page to ensure he fits within the time limit—each reading is approximately 40-45 minutes with time for a Q&A after. 

“I never have a set list of poems to read—I’ll have 2-3 poems in my head that I might open the night with, but I’ll walk in and try to get a feel for the night,” Black intimates, “based on people’s reactions I may end up reading a poem I’ve never read before.” 

Black intends to start “edgy,” potentially touching on racism and/or women’s issues. He will likely start with his first book (I Only Left for Tea), then move to the book about his father (Man with Two Shadows), then various publications, then a book about his mother—which he is currently prepping for publication—before ending with new work. 

Both Spencer and Black look forward to sharing work new and old in a fresh space. In that vein, both poets have offered a poem for the audiences of this blog. Spencer’s poem is from The Color After Green, and he feels it is a companion piece to the Gullah poem he may read at the event. Black’s poem is a recent one he was compelled to write after watching an ad card fall from a magazine.

Al.png

Beatitudes

 

Blessed is the morning.

Blessed is the coffee.

Blessed is the sun before the rain.

Blessed are the birds

that dampen traffic noise.

Blessed is the train that wails

and the siren song that fades.

Blessed is the drone of the plane that stays aloft.

Blessed are the dog walkers, the couples,

the skateboarders, the bike riders,

the joggers, the mommies pushing strollers,

and the daddies carrying daughters on shoulders.

Blessed are the lonely.

Blessed is the greening tree.

Blessed are the flowers that grow wild.

Blessed is the broken fence rail

I step over to enter the park.

Blessed is the cat that chases the squirrel

and the dog that scares the cat.

Blessed is the silent leaf blower

when the neighbor takes a break.

Blessed is the moss that fills

the empty spaces with color.

Blessed is the blue recycling bin

that sits outside our kitchen door.

Blessed is the card stock magazine ad

that falls at my feet

for it shall become a bookmark.

 

—     Al Black, 2021

 

Randy Spencer.png

Wind

                        September 23, 1989:

 

I can still feel it. The wind last night

sucked the breath out of me, flung it screaming

over the live oak and limbless pine.

Then the water swelling, some deep voice

sliding up to us, a dark face, its white woolen beard

spilling over us, straining the ballast

that kept our house rooted like a stiff barnacle

to some tether in the sand

My ears still roar like a seashell.

 

The ominous calm coming next. That calm

without even the random rustle of life,

birds appearing, silent in the dead air.

When the eye came, I walked outside.

There was a hole straight up

through all that darkness, like a tunnel,

starlight like pinhole punctures in a black screen.

I could barely see the pines, stunted, still straight,

but snapped off midway up, all clipped

the same height, bodiless legs

left planted in clay boots. I could see

cuts opened up in hardwoods, limbs broken

from live oaks, shrubs uprooted, scattered, terrifying.

 

It came back worse than before,

blowing oppositely, humming its tune

differently over the stringed forest. Inside,

when I could fall sleep I dreamed my ankle

braceletted by a whirl of rope leaping overboard

after an anchor, dragging me after it,

dreams of fish flying, their silver pancaked scales

covering my eyes, cutting into me like razors.

 

Then, this morning. Coming out

seeing sailboats piled like cordwood,

battered and strewn over the marsh,

masts stepped vertically yesterday

laying over now, angled north

as if they were still carrying sail,

reduced to sundials marking shadows in the morning sun,

birds blown north, vagrants, wounded, dazed,

Shells everywhere, freshly gutted open,

still slick with gristle or beaten white

and smooth, broken on some rock,

then carried inland, a whelk settled in a cowshed,

a purplish clam in a seaside garden

where chrysanthemums should be in bloom,

with my neighbors empty house half lifted

from its foundation and nesting in spartina grass,

on an ordinary autumn day

               with bright sunshine, mild sea breezes, soft breakers.

 

—    H.R. Spencer, from The Color After Green (in reference to Hurricane Hugo)

If you’re interested in potentially hearing these poems out loud and in hearing more from these poets, both readings occur in the coming days in Charleston. Black opens the Sundown Series tomorrow, June 1st, and Spencer reads Thursday, June 3rd. Both events begin at 6:30pm.  

Spencer’s collection can be purchased at larger retailers or directly from the publishing house, Finishing Line Press: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-color-after-green-by-h-r-spencer/  

Black’s books can also be purchased at larger retailers or the publishing house, Muddy Ford Press: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Two-Shadows-Al-Black/dp/1942081162

-Christina Xan

FALL LINES 2021: CALL for SUBMISSIONS for the 2020-2021 DOUBLE ISSUE

Fall Lines image.png

 

Fall Lines – a literary convergence is a literary journal presented by The Jasper Project in partnership with Richland Library and One Columbia for Arts and Culture.

Fall Lines will accept submissions of previously unpublished poetry, essays, short fiction, and flash fiction from April 1, 2021 through June 30, 2021. While the editors of Fall Lines hope to attract the work of writers and poets from the Carolinas and the Southeastern US, acceptance of work is not dependent upon residence. 

Publication in Fall Lines will be determined by a panel of judges and accepted authors (ONLY) will be notified by September 30, 2021, with a publication date in October. Two $250 cash prizes, sponsored by the Richland Library Friends and Foundation, will be awarded: The Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

DOUBLE ISSUE: Due to restrictions surrounding COVID-19, the 2020 issue of Fall Lines will be published in conjunction with the 2021 issue as a DOUBLE issue. Two unique sets of poetry and prose and two sets of winners will be bound together in ONE BOOK and celebrated with ONE Launch and Reading event at a TBD date in October. Both 2020 and 2021 prizes will be presented at the October 2021 launch event.

Ø  POETRY: Up to five poems may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five poems. Submit poetry submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word POETRY in the subject line.

 

Ø  PROSE: Up to five prose entries may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five prose submissions. Submit prose submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word PROSE in the subject line.

 

COVER SHEET should include your name, the titles of your submissions, your email address, and mailing address. Authors’ names should not appear on the submission. Do NOT send bios.

ALL ENTRIES SHOULD BE TITLED.

There is no fee to enter, but submissions that fail to follow the above instructions will be disqualified without review.

Simultaneous submissions will not be considered. Failure to disclose simultaneous submissions will result in a lack of eligibility in any future Jasper Project publications.

 __

 The Columbia Fall Line is a natural junction, along which the Congaree River falls and rapids form, running parallel to the east coast of the country between the resilient rocks of the Appalachians and the softer, more gentle coastal plain.

Spotlight on Writer Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan was born in Beaufort, SC in 1992 and relocated to Columbia in 2008. A graduate of Limestone College, she will be graduating this year with an MSW from Winthrop University.

Duncan says she began writing at the age of thirteen. “Writing was a way for me to express myself. My pre-teen and teen years were tough. I started off writing poems. I was most inspired by Langston Hughes.” 

Duncan says, “I’ve self-published six books thus far in total. My first book, Wordplay: A Potion Name Poetry was officially my introduction to the world of writing. It was composed of poems that I had written throughout the years.”  

Her other publications include Gumbo: A Potent Poetry and Parables, a novella titled Satan, You Can’t Have My Marriage, two books of erotica titled Secrets Under My tongue and Flames: Magic at Midnight; and her most recent book is, Tongues: Enter My Ethos. All have been self-published and are available from Amazon. 

Duncan started her own business in June of 2020, Anu Vision LLC and says, “I’ve been busy with getting that off the ground. I haven’t written in a while; however, you haven’t seen the last of me.”

 

 

And here’s a sample of Duncan’s work:

 

 

The G.O.A.T Chronicles

 

 I am God frequency energy

The inner-G in me is key to immortality

What I am relaying is a result of what I am displaying

Slaying the odds with my warmest regards

I am the essence of this message

I have opened a portal and undefeated by mortals

In totality and in total

Whether local or worldwide, my illumination, you just can’t hide

Fruitful and forbidden, my power cannot be hidden

With pride and stride, I conquered the battles presented to me

Now they realize that my presence is a present

I am King to the peasants

Power I devour, it’s what I represent

I ascend and send solutions for my revolution

I descend and suspend executions of my evolution

Consistency is infinitely embedded inside of me

My levels is hard to reach, hard to sustain

My reign on the throne is solidified

 My magnetism defies the isms

My prism holds the light—

It cannot be dimmed, try as you might

I have summoned my sanctuary

Building contrary to what was meant to bury, me

You’re not even worth my stardust

I am governed by the divine

This brilliance is my shrine

This is the rhythm, this is the rhyme

My potency should be a crime

The G.O.A.T— Greatest of all time

Fall Lines 2020 Saluda River Prize for Poetry Winner LISA HAMMOND talks with Jasper & Shares a New Poem

Hydrangeas 

by Lisa Hammond

They plant them in trailer parks. I am standing

between the topiaries and the statuary, mossy urns

hiding me from the women’s view. Fragrant hoops

and balls, rising spires of rosemary—they do not

know I can hear them, back behind stone fountains

splashing, zen temple bell, the little St. Francis.

Poor Hortensia, with her matronly name, flowers

I mostly see now run rampant alongside fallen fences,

old foundations, old fashioned, blowsy pink or blue.

At home I have the county extension agent’s flyer,

Change the pH of Your Soil, and I remember

how the grandmothers buried tin cans at the roots,

to bring out their blue eyes. I loved the fat conspicuous

blooms, thick-barked stems, how they’d overtake beds

when your back was turned. One neighbor poured hot

bacon grease on roots to kill hers—come spring they’d leg

themselves right up over her sorry fence again. Standing

in the nursery next to the pot feet, those two old ladies

so like that cranky neighbor, I remember the spring

I planted mine, my first year in the new house, how

I hoarded catalogues, Ayesah or Annabelle, Blue Bunny

or Snowqueen, how the first years it struggled, every

winter I thought it dead, every spring it crept back

a bit, a lone small nosegay budding, nothing like

the wild oakleaf outside my old bedroom window.

I had thought them so Southern Living, lacecaps

and mopheads trailing with grapevine over the silver

and linen. I carried them at my cousin’s wedding,

thirsty bouquet drooping alongside the sheer ribbon

before well before the toasts, photographs hurried.

O Dear Delores, O Silverleaf, O Brussels Lace,

here your solitary representative, a potbound pink

Everlasting tucked away behind begonias, object

of scorn. O Endless Summer, unhurried maiden,

I wait months for your snowballs, each heavy flower

spreading open to the wind, minding her own business.

~~~

Lisa Hammond

Lisa Hammond

Earlier this summer Jasper announced the winners of the Fall Lines 2020 Broad River Prize for Prose & the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and shared some of winner Randy Spencer’s prose and process.

Today we’re delighted to talk with Lisa Hammond, winner of our poetry prize.

Welcome Lisa!

JASPER: For the Jasper followers who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet, please tell us a bit about how you got to where you are now. For example, where did you grow up and go to school, and how and when did you make your way to Columbia?

HAMMOND: Cindi, thank you so much for the chance to meet some new friends through Jasper! I’m originally from South Carolina, born in Florence, and I’ve lived in South Carolina most of my life. I was a first-generation college student at Francis Marion and then went to graduate school at the University of Alabama. I felt like such a country girl on campus (well, I was such a country girl!)—it was a big, exciting university, amazing faculty and writers, beautiful architecture, a great library and natural history museum. When I finished my PhD, I taught for two years at Michigan State University. I loved the fall in Michigan, but winters seemed endless. I was very fortunate to find a job at a small university in Lancaster, South Carolina, close to my family, and I have been there ever since.

JASPER: Call you tell us about your work as a professor as USC Lancaster? What do you teach and what is your area of research?

HAMMOND: Most of my teaching is first-year composition, general education courses—so ENGL 101 and 102, Intro to Poetry, that sort of thing. I enjoy teaching those courses because I remember so well what it felt like to be a new college student who had no idea what to expect from college. I love helping students learn to see from different perspectives, to understand their preconceptions and to test those—do they always hold up? how does new information change your first way of thinking about and seeing a question? how do you present your ideas in a persuasive way? You hear a lot these days that college professors indoctrinate students—goodness, sometimes it feels like a victory if I can get them to do the reading! I think what we are actually seeing is students beginning to understand new ways to read, interpret, analyze. Those processes, fully engaged, change your thinking and your life.

Most of my research falls under the broad category of gender issues in American literature and culture. I’ve done a good bit of research on teaching with technology—I taught my first online women’s studies class in 2000, which is hard to believe now. I’ve written a great deal about Ursula K. Le Guin, one of American’s most talented and powerful writers. I study contemporary American women’s memoirs about motherhood. And I gave a talk at a conference about a year and a half ago called “What We Did in the Resistance: Public Poetry, Political Response, and the Women’s March” that I should really finish up as an article, but the political landscape is changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with. I’ve lately focused more on writing and publishing my own poetry as my scholarly work, but I like to stay in touch with my academic research areas too—my interest in one area informs my work in the other. Sometimes that means it takes me a long time to finish a project, but I think the work is richer for the connections.  

JASPER: Does your work at the university inform your writing much? How so?

HAMMOND: Grant Snider, the artist of the Incidental Comics series, has this great comic called Day Jobs of the Poets. I am pretty sure that if I won the lottery and suddenly could write full-time, I wouldn’t want to. I’m very lucky to have a professional life with a lot of range, many interesting projects and colleagues and students, so I often stumble across ideas at work that plant writing seeds. One drawback to my work for my writing life, though, is that I write a great deal for my job; the larger part of my job the last few years is my work as Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Research at USC Lancaster. I write a series of large reports every year. I just finished our annual state agency accountability report for the Governor and the General Assembly. Writing a university reaccreditation compliance document and writing a poem are two very different projects, but they both use my writing brain. So when I’m on deadline for large work writing projects, my own writing really dwindles in those periods.

My teaching, though, often brings me back to my own writing. Teaching any kind of writing keeps you close to your own writing, I find. In the last few years, I’ve been teaching more upper-level courses writing courses. I teach a senior-level business writing class that is fascinating—so much analysis of your audience there, understanding how to direct a message. I’m teaching an internship class right now, helping students learn outside the classroom; those students work in all kinds of organizations and businesses, so I have the opportunity to learn more about their careers and interests and am always running across interesting new ideas as I respond to their writing. I occasionally get to teach a 300-level creative writing class, which I LOVE because I write alongside my students. I write so much more in the semesters I teach that class because I stay in a daily writing practice with them. I find that writing a little every day means that I rarely finish a first draft of a poem in a sitting, but I write more over time. If I waited until I have big blocks of time, I’d never write another poem again.

JASPER: Are you primarily a poet, or do you practice prose writing as well?

HAMMOND: My prose writing is largely strategic planning documents! I am working on a prose poem series right now, which is something of a surprise for me, because I have always been in love with the poetic line and stanza form. Where does the line break? How does using couplets change the rhythm of the poem? The prose poem is an interesting challenge because you can’t rely on the line break to help you signal the importance of a word, for example. It’s also freeing; sometimes I spend so much time worrying a poem over stanzas and lines, but with the prose poem, you just start and keep going. The rhythm of a prose poems is different too, more accumulative, sometimes faster, so there’s an interesting opportunity to find ways to vary those rhythmic patterns. I’m finding these poems great fun to write, although I sometimes have to stop myself stewing over a line that ends with of, for example, or the—it’s not really a line, I have to tell myself. But often I tweak the spot that’s bugging me to shift the end word anyhow.

My mother took me to the library every week, usually when we came into town to the laundromat. She tells me I was an old soul early on

JASPER: Are you a life-long poet or did you begin writing later in life? What was the impetus for you to start writing?

HAMMOND: I can’t remember starting to write, so I’d say that qualifies me as a lifelong poet! (That sounds like a grand title, doesn’t it?) I come from a family of storytellers. My mother took me to the library every week, usually when we came into town to the laundromat. She tells me I was an old soul early on; I remember a second-grade teacher who made a deal with me—as soon as you finish your work for the day, you can skip recess and read the rest of the day. What a great year that was! I teach students who want to be writers that first they must read, often and widely. It may be that writing just runs in the family, though. One of my cousins is a poet, and so is my daughter. My daughter is at least as good a poet at twenty-five as I am now after a lifetime’s practice. Maybe better, if you consider that she won this same prize in 2018. I have a dear artist friend who says that it takes three generations to make a real artist. Now, having said that, let me hasten to add—talent is not inborn. What makes a writer is writing. Practice and persistence and putting the pen to the page, the fingers to the keyboard. 

JASPER: Who has influenced your writing and who are some of your favorite writers?

HAMMOND: I mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin above; one thing I love and admire about her writing is that her books can be so different from each other. When people ask me what Le Guin they should read, I say, well, if you like myths and fairy tales, The Wizard of Earthsea. If you like politics, The Dispossessed. If you like exploration, The Left Hand of Darkness. I love how she challenges her readers and herself. When The Left Hand of Darkness was published, she faced criticism for using male-gendered pronouns to describe an androgynous race. She defended her thought experiment and found it good—and then she came back several years later and said, wow, wasn’t I defensive? and I was wrong. She wrote an afterword for a later edition acknowledging her critics’ and imagining other ways she could have written the book. She changed the pronouns in three different chapters—three different approaches to the pronoun problem—so readers could see how the change affected their perception of the characters. She couldn’t rewrite the book, but she never stopped seeing it again either. I think she would have loved to see the current moment when the third person pronouns have been accepted by major style guides. What a gift, to watch a writer grow and change over such a long and amazing career.

I read a great deal of contemporary poetry, keeping a stack of books in rotation on my desk when I am writing: Claudia Emerson, Camille Dungy, Louise Glück, Kevin Young. Chelsea Rathburn, Tina Mozelle Braziel, Li-Young Lee, Eavan Boland, Nikky Finney. I tend to stay close to the lyric exploration of ordinary moments, so I love Linda Pastan, and Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things is a special favorite. I am also fascinated by how we understand history through poetry—Robin Coste Lewis does amazing things in Voyage of the Sable Venus. And Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin, wow. I love poetry anthologies as a way of meeting new poets and finding things outside of what I might normally first reach for. Sandra Beasley’s Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Sam Hamill’s The Erotic Spirit: An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing. Sandra Gilbert’s Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies. You can while away quite a few lovely quiet hours with food, sex, and death.

And once you see something a new way, you can’t unsee it.

JASPER: You are the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry in this year’s Fall Lines – a literary convergence for your poem, Hydrangeas, with which we opened this post. What can you tell us about the roots, if you will, of your poem Hydrangeas?

HAMMOND: Hydrangeas come in so many beautiful varieties, with all these amazing names.  Some names suggest the flower itself, like Brussels Lace, while others have these old-fashioned people names like Hortensia. The names are a song by themselves.

Hydrangeas seem to embody the contradictions of the South, lovely and vexed all at once. As part of the traditions of Southern entertaining, they suggest wealth and elegance, but some see them as common pests. I’m not sure they are actually classified as invasive plants, but some people do seem to see them that way. And they can change colors, like magic! How can the same plant mean such different things? But this is true throughout the South, with the many ways we tell our histories. The same wedding venue through one set of eyes is a gracious home, but through another, it is a haunted gravesite of enslaved people whose names have been erased. And once you see something a new way, you can’t unsee it. I can’t imagine wanting to. Hydrangeas grow in elegant Charleston gardens, but they also grow in ditches. In our grandmothers’ gardens, Alice Walker might say.

I was working on this idea at a retreat and went one afternoon to a greenhouse in Pawley’s Island, where I did actually overhear the first line of the poem. In some respects, this poem feels unfinished to me, perhaps because as Le Guin did, I am always learning to see things a new way. I don’t think the poem says everything I want to say. But at a certain point, the poem is done. You have to go write another one. And I’m still not very good at growing hydrangeas, although I do have a big beautiful bunch of them dropping those little blue speckles all over my desk right now.

JASPER: What do you do with yourself when you aren’t writing, teaching, or doing research?

HAMMOND: I’m a photographer and I love to draw. My poor family—I am always taking photos of them and writing poems about them. Art is another way of seeing, and my poetry and art are deeply connected, but for me the visual arts feel more like play. When I travel, the first thing I do is find the local museums and bookstores and art supply stores.

I don’t think our world will go back to what it was, and I don’t want it to—this moment is teaching us how we can change. But whoever said change is hard was seriously not kidding.

JASPER: How has COVID-19 affected you and your ability to practice your art?

HAMMOND: Artists are struggling, as we all are. Most people I know have either lost their jobs or are working harder than they’ve ever worked. One minute things seem ordinary, and the next you realize you left your mask in the car. Someone you know is sick or dead. The anger boiling in this country, George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and who knows who will be next. The protests that we march in, or are afraid to march in because we are at risk. Well, we are all at risk. We pass some horrifying marker, 100,000 dead in the United States, 150,000, and we’re approaching 200,000. How do we even understand these numbers? I can’t read anymore—books from before seem very much from before. The real world is as frightening as any apocalyptic novel now.

I’m lucky, I know, to be in the camp of folks who are working harder than they’ve ever worked, though some days that luck feels like hard luck—helping my students navigate the transition to online learning, working with several faculty one-on-one to help them with their classes, working on our university-wide reaccreditation. I’ve written exactly two poems since March, and that I finished anything feels like a miracle. I don’t usually write in the moment—I would love so much to be able to write and publish a poem in Rattle’s Poets Respond! Instead I keep journals and I draw. I note a thing or two each day that in a year I will come back to, will try to see again. I read as best I can and to have faith that I will come back to the writing as we settle more into this moment, the next. I don’t think our world will go back to what it was, and I don’t want it to—this moment is teaching us how we can change. But whoever said change is hard was seriously not kidding.

Sometimes you write your life, and sometimes you live it.

JASPER: Do you have any hints or recommendations for other poets on how to get through this strange period in all of our lives?

HAMMOND: I am doing several things to try to take care of myself.

A big piece of this is managing how I follow the news. The early days of the pandemic, we were all refreshing our newsfeeds constantly. That continuous exposure to changing circumstances meant constant adrenaline, constant anxiety, for me and I believe for many. I am not great at not looking at my phone first thing in the morning, but I do try. I have cut way back on my social media—this makes me a little lonely, but it gives me more time and lets me choose when I can take hearing the day’s bad news. I subscribe to a daily email summary from a small handful of trusted news outlets. I’m grateful for Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from an American, but I have no idea how she writes that and teaches and sleeps. I can’t wait for the day I can read that collection and remember this time, and it will be history.

I feel a great need to do something to help, so I have chosen a few causes and significantly upped my donations. I certainly am saving a lot of gas money working from home, and it makes me feel I am making some small difference. I wish it were a bigger difference, but maybe together all our small differences will make the bigger change.

And I try not to beat myself up, for not being ok, for not getting through everything I need to do, for not having the energy some days to even text a friend. I would never talk to a friend the way I talk to myself in my head, but I have to remind myself of that pretty regularly. Of course you didn’t get through all those papers to grade today, of course you will write again.

I’m a slow writer in normal circumstances—I recommend Louise DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity. Time is so strange in this moment—fast and slow, the markers we normally use to note the progress of our days and years gone or fundamentally changed. It’s ok to take time to sit with this grief and wonder. When you are ready to write again, write a little every day. It’s ok if it’s bad. It’s ok if you don’t finish. A little every day will take you places, when you are ready.

Sometimes you write your life, and sometimes you live it.

~~~

Elizabeth Warren Dreams of Kissing Babies

by Lisa Hammond

It is good and over, the long campaign, debates, VP

speculation. Would you say yes? Yes. I would help any way

I can. He called himself to tell me, of course. He’s a

decent man. Another disappointment, but not a

surprise. All those pinky promises and all those little girls. The

Zoom convention, a soft cornflower blue sweater,

balancing careful scripted banter with hope. Kamala is

making history. All my plans long ago pulled down from

the headquarters wall and recycled, Empowering

American Workers and Raising Wages, Strengthening

Our Democracy, My Plan to Cancel Student Loan

Debt on Day One of My Presidency. Whether or not I

smile enough. Only the election left, and in truth, there’s

some relief—they cannot blame me for what is

coming. The reporters yelling from the sidelines, will

you be a key player in the new administration? We both

want the same thing. The reporters and the crowd surge

forward, I know it is before because the mothers push

their babies towards me, no one masked, no one

distancing, no one knowing what is coming. Dream big,

the mama says, fight hard, the children reply. I can’t stay

in this crowd and I want to say it again but don’t, I am

running for president because that’s what girls do. The choices

left now. We want this country to work and we want it to work

for everyone. Smiling or strident. Either way my face

hurts.

Meet New Jasper Intern Christina Xan and Read About a Favorite Poet Cynthia Dewi Oka

"...language is not fixed and is always moving. We, as people, are continuously evolving, and our poetry does have to not stay stagnant." - Christina Xan

Hi! I’m Christina Xan, and I’m a new intern here at Jasper for the 2018-2019 year. I’m currently a grad student at USC working on my MA in Lit. When I’m not busy taking and teaching classes, which is essentially never, I’m quickly grasping for time …

Hi! I’m Christina Xan, and I’m a new intern here at Jasper for the 2018-2019 year. I’m currently a grad student at USC working on my MA in Lit. When I’m not busy taking and teaching classes, which is essentially never, I’m quickly grasping for time to scribble down plays and poetry or to make a ruckus banging on my keyboard in my apartment. My favorite activities include screaming over how perfect my cats are to the point of getting noise complaints, wearing the same pair of jeans to paint in because they were *so* expensive but got ruined on the first day, and eating so many cupcakes and tacos in one sitting that I slide into a comatose state for at least a week.

Cynthia Dewi Oka

 

I’ve been reading and writing poetry since I was a little girl, and when I was in undergrad, I still had time to fit in reading poetry especially since I was a creative writing minor. However, once the first year of my MA rolled around, my time for any reading outside of class dwindled, and by the end of that first year, I realized I hadn’t read one new book of poetry in pretty much the entire time I’d been in grad school. So, I dedicated the beginning of this past summer to getting back to it. One of the first poets I stumbled across was Cynthia Dewi Oka when she was featured on Poets.org. I find poets through their site all the time, and I usually add them to my list of “Poets to Keep an Eye On,” but when I read Oka’s poem on that site (it kills me that I can’t remember which one), I became completely and wholly entranced. I basically flew to Amazon and bought both of her books of poetry, a decision I have not regretted once.

 

Oka’s work is far from unappreciated; she is a three time Pushcart Nominee who has two published books of poetry: Nomad of Salt and Hard Water and Salvage. Something that drew me to her right away was that her first work, Nomad of Salt and Hard Water, has come out in two editions, each of which are, to some degree, different from one another – I love this. While containing the same poems for the most part, Oka took the time between the publications of her first and second editions to reflect on what she felt the first publication lacked, editing poems for the second edition as well as adding new ones. While some people may criticize Oka for going back and changing her already published poems, for me this is just a demonstration that language is not fixed and is always moving. We, as people, are continuously evolving, and our poetry does have to not stay stagnant.

"Particularly, when Oka says at the end that “to wake will not mean betrayal, to be lost will not mean goodbye” I felt that she was speaking to all of us who have to lock part of ourselves away, that it is a call to all of us to not fear the light of our own suns."

Although Oka’s poems may be everchanging, for me, Oka’s poems pretty much boil down to one thing: identity. I suppose that if you break any piece of writing down to one thing you could say that it’s identity, that we’re always writing about ourselves in a way to understand ourselves. However, there’s something special about Oka, the way she writes about our struggle to take broken pieces of our identities to form something recognizable, something we can, as her aptly titled second book is called, salvage. What’s wonderful about Oka is that while her poems can be very specific in audience, I believe anyone can relate to them. Many times she writes to and about minorities, and her poems both speak to them and to others, partially by teaching those of us who are not minorities about their struggle. However, whether you’re a minority that has suffered a fracturing of your identity by a culture you’ve been unable to fight against or you’re just a human being whose biggest enemy against your identity is, well, you, there’s a poem for you in Oka’s work. One of my favorite poems from Nomad called “Soothsayer” is a perfect example of this. This poem is painfully relevant, a poem for those who look for refuge in a country that is not their own. However, even though I’m not an immigrant, this poem speaks to me in a personal way. Particularly, when Oka says at the end that “to wake will not mean betrayal, to be lost will not mean goodbye” I felt that she was speaking to all of us who have to lock part of ourselves away, that it is a call to all of us to not fear the light of our own suns.

 

While the content of the poem is obviously exceptionally important, the structure of a poem is equally so. I personally really appreciate people playing with form, trying something new, and speaking to an audience not just from the way a poem sounds but the way it looks. Oka has a perfect balance with form – she is able to break boundaries without alienating her reader. A poem in Salvage that I’ve particularly fallen in love with is “Winter Country,” and it’s mainly because of the form. Oka does something wonderfully unique with this poem. In her books, most of the poems are aligned to the left margin. “Winter Country” is split into two parts. One half contains the title and the poem, aligned to the right margin, while on the left margin appears a separate part of the poem in a different form, not under the title, and in different ink, only relating to the same subject. By putting half of the poem in a faded grey ink just behind the rest, Oka makes it appear almost as if the poem is haunting itself, something I personally haven’t seen done before.

 

In the end, I’ve fallen in love with Oka. She has a way of touching me with her words that I don’t find easily these days. On the cover of Salvage, Joy Harjo writes, “We are in the thick of the sludge of salvage, in an age of greedy locusts…when visionaries are bound to emerge. Cynthia Dewi Oka is one of these visionaries, a word prophet,” and I think if you take a few moments to read any one of her poems, you’ll agree.

~~~~0~~~~

It's a great time to join or renew your membership in

The Jasper Guild!

We're raising money to pay for the publication of Jasper Magazine now!

Join today and get a free bottomless beer or wine cup at the Magazine Release Party on September 21st at Stormwater Studios!

And see your name in print in this issue of Jasper Magazine!

 

 

 

JasperProject72forWEB.jpg

Something like a review - Cassie Premo Steele's Tongues in Trees, poems 1994 - 2017

"... Coin by coin, drop your worth into the jar of your heart and feel the equity begin. You are not a commodity...."

from Trust, by Cassie Premo Steele

 

cassie tongues in trees.jpg

I’ve been enjoying spending some time the past week or so with Cassie Premo Steele’s newest collection of poetry, Tongues in Trees, poems 1994 – 2017, published by Unbound Content in 2017. I nabbed a copy from Cassie on First Thursday when Cassie, along with Randy Spencer, so generously read for Kathryn Van Aernum’s opening of Common Ground at Anastasia & Friends. Kathryn’s show will be up for the rest of August, by the way, if you missed this lovely look at the places where we put our feet on a daily basis.

Cassie’s collection is divided into three sections—1994-2004, 2006-2016, and 2017. I met Cassie during the second section of this book when she taught me two classes in the women’s and gender studies graduate certificate program at USC – theory and methods. It was an interesting experience to learn theory and methods from an instructor who was not a social scientist. My first two degrees were in sociology and sociologists live and die by theory and methods. The scientific method validates our work when novices want to compare our work to the findings of Oprah. I was all about the N.

But one of the things Cassie taught me was that there are other important ways to validate reality in addition to statistical significance. And her point was well taken. Just because a person’s reality does not reside within the safe neighborhood of the majority does not negate their reality. Of course, I knew this already but her way of reminding me this, after the fully immersive experience of being a survey research wonk, changed my world. And I thank her for that.

 

Cassie Premo Steele (photo by Suzanne Kappler) 

Cassie Premo Steele (photo by Suzanne Kappler)

 

In reading Cassie’s collection, I’ve become aware of how much the author’s world has also changed in the time I’ve known her. Without going into personal details, Cassie’s paradigm shifted in several ways over the course of our friendship. And it shifted beautifully to a place of fulfillment and authenticity. Her collection of poems and their shifting persuasions are elegantly emblematic of her growth as a scholar, an artist, and a human being. The nature of this book continues to teach me (remind me) about the importance of fluidity, of being in the moment, of keeping my feet close to the ground but still floating gently enough above it that I can still move easily and purposefully, exploring places and realities from many perspectives, even the most lonely and quiet.

I don’t know how to thank this poet, this friend, for such an important and powerful lesson.

But I can share with you my favorite poem from this lovely collection which is, probably not coincidentally, the next to last poem in the book. This poem tells me that patience should not be so exalted that it becomes a bog of our best intentions, and it reminds me once again that constructs, when they are first born, are made of wishes and fumes. We add the bricks and mortar. And we can tear them down. - CB

 

World

By Cassie Premo Steele

 

I see your boots by the bed and I shed years of straightening

up not sitting till it was right the spoon out of the sink the towel

on the rack the peanut butter capped the coat in the closet the plants

watered and animals fed but none of this straightened me so I threw

spoons until a visitor came and it was you and we threw towels

on the floor ate everything with our fingers took boxes from the

closet and let a spring come up to feed and water the world.

 

~~O~~

www.cassiepremosteele.com

 

Cindi Boiter is the founder and executive director of The Jasper Project and the editor of Jasper Magazine.

 

The Jasper Project is a non-profit all-volunteer organization that provides collaborative arts engineering for all disciplines of arts and artists in the South Carolina Midlands and throughout the state. Please help us continue to meet our mission of validating the cultural contributions of all artists and growing community within the arts by becoming a member of the Jasper Guild .  We'll print your name in the magazine, thank you on social media, and love you forever!

www.JasperProject.org

 

 

Columbia's Favorite Poetry - today Featuring Al Black

national poetry month.jpg

In celebration of National Poetry Month the Jasper Project invited several artists, writers, and leaders in the Columbia arts community to share with us their favorite poems and most of them generously accepted.

We’ve put together this collection of our favorite poems and will be sharing them with you, poem by poem, day by day, over the month of April. Some of the poems are old and traditional, others are new and inventive. Some are whimsical, others are insightful. Some rhyme. Some don’t.

What they all have in common is that someone you know loves that poem – and this gives us such lovely insight into the soul of our community.

Thank you to everyone who shared their poetry with us.

And Happy National Poetry Month from Jasper.

 

Today's poem comes to us from Al Black.

 

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

 

A Hoosier in the land of cotton, Al Black was born and raised in Lafayette, Indiana.  He has been married 46 years to Carol Agnew Black; they have four grown children and six grandchildren.  Black began writing verse at age nine, but kept his poems strictly to himself. In late 2008, he moved to South Carolina so his wife could accept a job as a professor of Sociology. Unemployed for the first time and free from family and community expectations, he publicly shared his first poetry eight years ago.  Black is co-founder of Poets Respond to Race and hosts several poetry and music events in Columbia, SC; he considers himself a northern born Southern poet because it was here in the South that he felt free to blossom.


 

Al Black

Al Black

Columbia's Favorite Poetry - Today Featuring Eric Bargeron

national poetry month.jpg

In celebration of National Poetry Month the Jasper Project invited several artists, writers, and leaders in the Columbia arts community to share with us their favorite poems and most of them generously accepted.

We’ve put together this collection of our favorite poems and will be sharing them with you, poem by poem, day by day, over the month of April. Some of the poems are old and traditional, others are new and inventive. Some are whimsical, others are insightful. Some rhyme. Some don’t.

What they all have in common is that someone you know loves that poem – and this gives us such lovely insight into the soul of our community.

Thank you to everyone who shared their poetry with us.

And Happy National Poetry Month from Jasper.

 

Today's poem comes to us from Eric Bargeron --

 

spring song 

 

the green of Jesus

is breaking the ground

and the sweet

smell of delicious Jesus

is opening the house and

the dance of Jesus music

has hold of the air and

the world is turning

in the body of Jesus and

the future is possible

 

Lucille Clifton, "spring song" from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright 

Eric Bargeron

Eric Bargeron

Columbia's Favorite Poetry - Today Featuring Aida Rogers

national poetry month.jpg

In celebration of National Poetry Month the Jasper Project invited several artists, writers, and leaders in the Columbia arts community to share with us their favorite poems and most of them generously accepted.

We’ve put together this collection of our favorite poems and will be sharing them with you, poem by poem, day by day, over the month of April. Some of the poems are old and traditional, others are new and inventive. Some are whimsical, others are insightful. Some rhyme. Some don’t.

What they all have in common is that someone you know loves that poem – and this gives us such lovely insight into the soul of our community.

Thank you to everyone who shared their poetry with us.

And Happy National Poetry Month from Jasper.

 

Today's poem comes to us from Aida Rogers and here's what she says about it -- 

Here's one my grandmother would read to us. I didn't quite understand it, but the part about Little Bridget under the lake would just freak me out. Plus, what could sound more delicious to your ear and shivery up your spine and more adventurous in life than traveling "up an airy mountain and down the rushy glen"?

 

 

William Allingham (1824-1889)

          The Fairies

    UP the airy mountain, 
        Down the rushy glen, 
    We daren't go a-hunting
        For fear of little men; 
    Wee folk, good folk, 
        Trooping all together; 
    Green jacket, red cap, 
        And a white owl's feather!

    Down along the rocky shore
        Some make their home, 
    They live on crispy pancakes
        Of yellow tide-foam; 
    Some in the reeds
        Of the black mountain lake, 
    With frogs for their watch-dogs, 
        All night awake.

    High on the hill-top
        The old King sits; 
    He is now so old and gray
        He's nigh lost his wits. 
    With a bridge of white mist
        Columbkill he crosses, 
    On his stately journeys
        From Slieveleague to Rosses; 
    Or going up with music
        On cold starry nights, 
    To sup with the Queen
        Of the gay Northern Lights.

    They stole little Bridget
        For seven years long; 
    When she came down again
        Her friends were all gone. 
    They took her lightly back, 
        Between the night and morrow, 
    They thought that she was fast asleep, 
        But she was dead with sorrow. 
    They have kept her ever since
        Deep within the lake, 
    On a bed of flag-leaves, 
        Watching till she wake.

    By the craggy hill-side, 
        Through the mosses bare, 
    They have planted thorn-trees
        For pleasure here and there. 
    Is any man so daring
        As dig them up in spite, 
    He shall find their sharpest thorns
        In his bed at night.

    Up the airy mountain, 
        Down the rushy glen, 
    We daren't go a-hunting
        For fear of little men; 
    Wee folk, good folk, 
        Trooping all together; 
    Green jacket, red cap, 
        And a white owl's feather!

 

 

Aïda Rogers is a writer in Columbia who unfashionably likes poems that rhyme. She is the editor of the anthology series State of the Heart: South Carolina Writers on the Places They Love. Volume 3 will be released in August by USC Press.

 

Aida Rogers

Aida Rogers

Columbia's Favorite Poetry - Today Featuring Michael Dowdy

national poetry month.jpg

In celebration of National Poetry Month the Jasper Project invited several artists, writers, and leaders in the Columbia arts community to share with us their favorite poems and most of them generously accepted.

We’ve put together this collection of our favorite poems and will be sharing them with you, poem by poem, day by day, over the month of April. Some of the poems are old and traditional, others are new and inventive. Some are whimsical, others are insightful. Some rhyme. Some don’t.

What they all have in common is that someone you know loves that poem – and this gives us such lovely insight into the soul of our community.

Thank you to everyone who shared their poetry with us.

And Happy National Poetry Month from Jasper.

Michael Dowdy shares one of his favorite poems with us today --

 

If “El Fruto” (The Fruit) is a Garden of Eden poem, in the voice of Eve, it is one in which the Chicano (Mexican-American) poet Juan Felipe Herrera paints that biblical world as strange, sensuous, effervescent, fleshy and feverish, terrible and joyous. But it’s the last line that jabs me in the ribs, for there we fall into our 21st-century predicament, where god isn’t Old Testament or New but a superrich CEO who tempts with the “delicate voice” of dollar bills.

 

El Fruto

 

The apple wasn’t our true origin.

The tree, well, it offered its own brand of shade.

The parrot, can you see him? The witness of this account.

We had just come back from the Serpent Café, rebellious.

We had just washed in black light & oyster sauce.

Our fragrance was of sex, lemon rind and coral.

He mentioned the brutalities of the heavens.

I pointed to the blistered boulevards, the musicians

in stoic delight, their gaping violin wounds.

He mentioned the ecstasy beneath his blonde ribs.

I turned away, called my sisters, Tara, Queen of Illusion,

Mayahuel, Goddess of Dark Jazz Nectars. Then

a delicate voice flashed from above, it ripped away

the milk from my lips, the wine from his eyes.

It was King Executive, Demi-god of the New Business.

 

 

 

Michael Dowdy is the author of Urbilly, winner of the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization, a study of Latina/o poetry. With the poet Claudia Rankine, he is coediting…

Michael Dowdy is the author of Urbilly, winner of the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization, a study of Latina/o poetry. With the poet Claudia Rankine, he is coediting the forthcoming anthology, American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). Originally from Blacksburg, Virginia, he teaches at the University of South Carolina.

Columbia's Favorite Poetry, Today Featuring Ed Madden

"It’s about who you are inside, but also about how the good and authentic version of who you are helps you to live ethically in the world."  

national poetry month.jpg

In celebration of National Poetry Month the Jasper Project invited several artists, writers, and leaders in the Columbia arts community to share with us their favorite poems and most of them generously accepted.

We’ve put together this collection of our favorite poems and will be sharing them with you, poem by poem, day by day, over the month of April. Some of the poems are old and traditional, others are new and inventive. Some are whimsical, others are insightful. Some rhyme. Some don’t.

What they all have in common is that someone you know loves that poem – and this gives us such lovely insight into the soul of our community.

Thank you to everyone who shared their poetry with us.

And Happy National Poetry Month from Jasper.

Today, we feature Ed Madden.

 

~~~

 

When I think about a poet and a poem that has always spoken to me, always drawn me and haunted me, I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins and “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” There’s something about Hopkins that feels uncannily personal to me and sometimes resistant to the ways I summarize and explicate and parse in the classroom. I don’t teach Hopkins often, and when I do I find myself getting effusive—about the quirky prayer of praise for the particular and the peculiar in “Pied Beauty,” orr about his desperately exuberant exploded sonnet of theology “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.“ Or the poem To what serves mortal beauty,” in which he insists that beauty draws us to the things of this world and thus to the divine, but beauty (he is especially troubled by the beauty of young men) can also become an end rather than a means, may distract rather than instruct. Or I get lost in all those haunting sonnets of melancholy, the writer desperate to be faithful but crushed by darkness and deep depression.

 

I love Hopkins. A quirky writer, driven by sound (sometimes at the expense of sense) and given to idiosyncratic rhythms and syntax. A closeted gay man, repressed and depressed in a religious culture to which he devoted his life. Later, stuck in Ireland as a college teacher and overwhelmed by all the exams he had to grade. Deeply religious, but also deeply in love with the natural world, which is, he thinks—which must be—a revelation of the divine. He wrote in a meditation, “All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God, and, if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.” Several years ago, I participated in a spiritual development retreat at the Lutheran seminary, reading and discussing Hopkins with the seminarians. I felt both out of place and absolutely at home there. Like being in a Hopkins poem.

 

Of all of his poems, it is “As kingfishers catch fire” that I find myself returning to again and again. The syntax is quirky, and the poem is filled with the kind of sonic density I admire in his work (and try, sometimes, to emulate in my own). It is a poem about the beauty of the world, but even more about how the flame of the divine flares most when we embrace our particularity, our singularity, when we live what we were meant to be. Like a bell that sings out its self, its name, so each of us must live out our own authenticities. (The fact that the poem is hard to read aloud just further emphasizes for me the particularities of sound and self.)  Hopkins even makes up a verb: selves. “What I do is me:” he writes, “for that I came.”

 

This “what I do is me” is not the tolerant you-do-you we hear in contemporary culture, not “do what you think is best for you.” It’s about who you are inside, but also about how the good and authentic version of who you are helps you to live ethically in the world. “The just man justices,” Hopkins writes, again making up a verb, suggesting not that we are what we do, but that we do who we are. If we are just, we live justice. And who we are is both us and more than us. What I do is me.

 

That’s the octave, the first part of the sonnet where the writer sets the scene, makes a proposition, states the terms. Then the volta, the turn, and the shorter and tighter sestet draws conclusions, moves toward some resolution. For Hopkins, after his little idiosyncratic sermon about selving, he takes an almost-orthodox turn. The just man acts Christlike—or in Hopkins’s quirky phrasing, “Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Christ.” But he pushes on: Christ may be the model for who we can be or what we can do, but Christ is already present in all of us, in lovely limbs and lovely eyes and in faces that aren’t his. It’s not piety or strict adherence to some doctrine or other; it’s not work, it’s play. Christ—whether you read that as the Christian deity or as a figure for our better selves—plays in ten thousand places, and shines through the features of men’s faces. I know, of course, he means the play of a flame, but a good poet can be a punster, and Hopkins wants to say that this is play, not work.

 

Or it should be play. “All things are charged with love,” as he writes elsewhere, charged with God. If only we knew how to touch, how to see and apprehend, they would take fire—like the blue flash of a kingfisher’s wing—flow through, ring out. So he wants to teach us how to see, a lesson found in the last word of the poem: faces. The rhyme places-faces locates the divine in the faces around us. In the other. There is something deeply human (and humanist) and deeply ethical about this theology, and every rhyme in this quirky little meditation confirms the poet’s argument. The flame of the divine—the good, the true, the authentic—is your name, it’s why you’re here. Justice may be what he is, but grace shines in places and faces not his (not His).

 

Though I left the strict church of my youth and now find myself among the unaffiliated Nones, I remain deeply compelled by this poem. It could be my daily meditation, my daily prayer: What I do is me, for this I came. Like the flash of a kingfisher’s iridescence, the divine (the good, the just, the true, the authentic, the ethical) may shine in all of us. Like the bell that rings out its own name, each of us can sing the song we were meant to be. And if only we could recognize the holiness of one another, this could be a world of grace and, yes, justice.

 

Look around you, he says. The world is on fire with love. And God shines in the face of everyone you meet. If only we could learn how to see it.

 

That’s fucking beautiful.

 

 

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; 

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells 

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's 

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; 

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; 

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, 

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. 

 

I say móre: the just man justices; 

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; 

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — 

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, 

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his 

To the Father through the features of men's faces. 

 

Ed Madden is the author of several books of poetry. He is the poet laureate for the city of Columbia, the poetry editor for Jasper Magazine and Muddy Ford Press, and the director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at USC.
 
Ed Madden

Ed Madden

Columbia's Favorite Poetry - Today Featuring Sheila Morris

national poetry month.jpg

In celebration of National Poetry Month the Jasper Project invited several artists, writers, and leaders in the Columbia arts community to share with us their favorite poems and most of them generously accepted.

We’ve put together this collection of our favorite poems and will be sharing them with you, poem by poem, day by day, over the month of April. Some of the poems are old and traditional, others are new and inventive. Some are whimsical, others are insightful. Some rhyme. Some don’t.

What they all have in common is that someone you know loves that poem – and this gives us such lovely insight into the soul of our community.

Thank you to everyone who shared their poetry with us.

And Happy National Poetry Month from Jasper.

 

Today we're featuring Sheila Morris's favorite poem, Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, [My Native Land] by Sir Walter Scott

My dad loved poetry and recited this poem and countless others from The Best Loved Poems of the American People, his favorite book, when I was very young. He carried his Bible to church every Sunday, but he read poetry the other six days of the week.
 

 Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI

 

   Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

   This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,

As home his footsteps he hath turn’d

   From wandering on a foreign strand!

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;

High though his titles, proud his name,

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;—

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

Sheila Morris

Sheila Morris

Sheila Morris is the editor of Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement published in 2017 by the University of South Carolina Press.

Columbia's Favorite Poetry - Today featuring Susan Lenz

national poetry month.jpg

In celebration of National Poetry Month the Jasper Project invited several artists, writers, and leaders in the Columbia arts community to share with us their favorite poems and most of them generously accepted.

We’ve put together this collection of our favorite poems and will be sharing them with you, poem by poem, day by day, over the month of April. Some of the poems are old and traditional, others are new and inventive. Some are whimsical, others are insightful. Some rhyme. Some don’t.

What they all have in common is that someone you know loves that poem – and this gives us such lovely insight into the soul of our community.

Thank you to everyone who shared their poetry with us.

And Happy National Poetry Month from Jasper.

 

The reason I like Trees by Joyce Kilmer:
My second grade class presented a special, springtime play, The Wizard of Oz.  I was not selected for a speaking part. I was to stand in the background in a green pillowcase with green crepe paper attached to my arms (and the ink ran).  I was a tree, not even a tree that got to throw an apple at Dorothy, just a plain-old-boring-tree-standing-still.  I hated everything about it until the day of the performance.  My mother took me aside and recited Trees by Joyce Kilmer.  She then put me back in line to enter the stage and snapped a photo of me, smiling.  The poem saved the day. It was alright to be a tree.
PS  Since then, trees are pretty special too!   

 

Trees

 

I think that I shall never see 

A poem lovely as a tree. 

 

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast; 

 

A tree that looks at God all day, 

And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 

 

A tree that may in Summer wear 

A nest of robins in her hair; 

 

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 

Who intimately lives with rain. 

 

Poems are made by fools like me, 

But only God can make a tree.

Susan is an internationally renown fiber and installation artist based out of Columbia, SC.
 
Susan Lenz in tree costume - center

Susan Lenz in tree costume - center