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THE RIVERS-COFFEY POETS AT APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY by Al Young
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Saturday 6 September 2003 “When Daniel Boone hit these parts around 1830, he enlisted the help of a black man who knew the region well. That’s how Boone got to this town that was named after him. Boone, not the black man, is credited with discovering and founding the town.” This is more or less what Bruce Dick, an associate professor of English at Appalachian State University told you. Bruce— who has written extensively about Richard Wright, Ishmael Reed and Rudolfo Anaya, among others—specializes in African American and Latino American literature. You’d first met in Paris in the early 1990s at the Richard Wright celebration co-organized by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the Sorbonne’s Michel Fabre. You loved catching up and conversing with him while he motored up the mountain toward Broyhill Inn, where you’d first stayed when you came here to give a reading back in 1992. Up here again in Blue Ridge Mountain country, you can’t help but think of Northern California’s Squaw Valley, where you teach fiction and other prose in summer. This is North Carolina’s breathtaking ski country. “They keep chopping off mountainsides,” Bruce adds, “to expand this sprawl,and put up these strip malls.” 12 October 2003And what we fall into in this, your glorious month of months, becomes and remains the mystery that powers life. Your students, wonderful each of them, invite you to their special poetry presentations—to Wednesday’s Lyric or to Friday’s Zoetrope—and you accept. To watch Lisa, Sabriya, Jaclyn, Will and others get up and read their own poems or recite the poems of others give you enormous pleasure. Standing and performing poems of your own is also an inspiration, especially when an audience gets what you’re driving at. Kids don’t always know where you’re coming from, as the saying went, but they’re poised and usually ready for anything. —from BOONE.DOC: A Personal Journal These two diary entries—the first set down as I arrived to begin my six-week stay at Appalachian State University, the second penned just before departure—frame the setting and meaning of my presence on that lovely campus as the first Rivers-Coffey Professor of Creative Writing. Working from assignments I devised, the group of 10 met weekly. Students read and discussed each other’s work. Because performance poetry is warmly followed at ASU, some of the young poets preferred to memorize and recite their work rather than read it aloud from the page. It was Sabriya Miller who founded Lyric, an informal association of performance poets who meet on campus Wednesday nights to air and strut their stuff. Friday all manner of poets meet at a coffee café known as Zoetrope to read and recite. And so it was that I became in 2003 the very first Rivers-Coffey Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. If my visit were successful, then the school would be in a position to bring a writer in yearly for six weeks. The students had signed up months in advance for this little workshop. It all went beautifully. The mini-course is still going strong and kicking it. It feels good to know that in this dark time, the ancient, breathing force of poetry is still lighting up the hearts and lives of brand new women and men. —AL YOUNG Berkeley, California 11 September 2004
Steven A. Constant CAUTION TAPE
Brown sky facing a brown earth runga dunga runga dunga Machines rusting brown bore down runga dunga runga dunga Construction men covered by brown runga dunga runga dunga runga dunga
They go for the money in the brown runga dunga runga dunga Same dull brown trees blowing in the breeze runga dunga runga dunga While brown lipped men breathe without ease runga dunga runga dunga runga dunga
Nothing other then brown dirt runga dunga runga dunga Standing, struggling, singing brown runga dunga runga dunga In the end they will all be in brown ground runga dunga runga dunga runga dunga * * *
Katy Gilbert SPLENDOR
Eating
warmed meat * * *
Will Howell IN GEORGETOWN
An endless parade of people pass by a man with a dirty face, a sign, a cup. They clutch Prada bags, Armani satchels, and keep their eyes focused on soft, supple, Italian leather shoes.
This is the place where invisible men sit on street corners, while the blind walk by. * * *
Morgan Klein “PATRIOTISM”
What, terrorism? Well it’s something you should know a lot about G.W. Oh, by the way, F*** You. I see you talking on T.V., I can’t believe it’s you there and not me. Microsoft should make autocorrect for your stupid ass, oh wait you sold them out too. Nothin’ but another rich kid filling an oldtimer’s shoe. My best interests, you say that’s what you’re looking out for? I say you’re full of shhh… and that’s what you really want, for me to shut up, and pretend that the freedom you provide is over my head, that I don’t understand that I’m not the man and that the man is Uncle Sam. Right now I’m looking into my computer screen and who knows? You may be looking back at me, 342 pages say it’s ok for you to spy while I type words on a page. I’m writing this for class, wanna know my grade? Apparently you can with a click or just a phone call away. And what you’re telling me is inside that box of platic with mother – board, fuses, and wires runnin’ through and through is the NSA, CIA, and FBI too? Intelligence information systems tracking my every move. Well I say… Go…To…Hell Because today I took my computer out the back door of my little house in the woods (that’s right, no more email) through a field filled with brush and now gasoline, set that f***er on fire no ounce of pity or desire to put out those flames my patriotism down the mother-f***in’ drain * * *
Lisa Kwong
CUT-DOWN AND BROKEN NO MORE Inspired by Theo Ortman's painting "Surrealistic Scene"
Afraid to bare our inner caves, we hide like leaves in the sky, trembling like stunned fish. Faces obscured by clouds, only our eyes see outside to the world. Trees grow in our yards, branches heavy as anchors.
Family and friends anchor us, but cannot bear our burdens. Having their own trees to care for, they leave us, abandoned like orphans. Our eyes flood until the desert arrives, and then we must fish
for ways to survive. Our parents say eating fish makes us smart. But can it anchor minds like bricks? Protect eyes from floods? Help us bear storms of winds and crackling leaves? Tired of watching others shape our trees,
we descend from clouds. Our trees will no longer be molded by slimy fishes of men and women who see us as small leaves on burdened branches. Time to lift the anchors we have placed on our inner caves, time to bare our branches, to show more than our eyes.
Now when they look into our eyes, they will see life, not cut-down trees and broken branches. The bears inside of us will crush fishy
skeletons who try to anchor us in fear and make us leave
behind our dreams. Leaves will blossom on our branches. Our eyes will lift to the sky. Anchored in God's strength, we shall live. Our tall trees will endure heavy winds while fish look stunned, their secrets bared.
Big, fleshy leaves finally grow on our trees, while our eyes stare down the fish who anchored us in fear, but now lie stunned and bare.
* * *
Sabriya Miller
MY LITTLE BROWN BOOK BY JOHN COLTRANE (His Little Brown Book)
His little brown book
Full of notes that play hopscotch over the page
Wage war on the ordinary
Notes sorta carry like
Liquid
But Jump scales like jumping jacks
Lay easy on the backs of syntax
Lay easy on the mind
Wonder what was on his mind
Fusion of bitter and sweetness
Thrown into a heap
Pressed into
His
Little
Brown
Book
His little brown book
I wonder were there words inside
The words that made his saxophone cry
Soprano voice sing loud; alive
I wonder could you read his life
Nights spent in jazz bars, women,
And company hard full of liquor
And music
Smoke filled music
I wonder how he used it
His
Little
Brown
Book
His little brown book
The pages could have been blank
Waiting to be filled like a tank on
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Ever ready with anticipation
But Coltrane got that improvisation
That relation with just the music
Just the music and himself
And maybe the little brown book
Got left on the shelf
* * *
Alexandra Moody POEM TO MY SISTER
Bobby pins on the sink. Brown. Some almost rusted. Peach band-aids stretched over swollen, bloody toes.
Dancing through her childhood. Now she’s a woman using equipment she doesn’t know how to operate.
Ballet slippers sweep across our hard wood floor touch the used ones she hangs in front of her window.
And I sit in the audience wanting to cry at her lovely figure in front of me
so graceful, so beautiful I want to wrap my applause around her.
Feel the warmth of her strong body. And the ice of her leotard.
* * *
Jaclyn Shambaugh
STARTS AND ENDS
To those who live in birdhouses, Watching picnic blankets come down, It looks like the sky is falling In shades of orange and red and brown.
Steal the taste of the Earth dying From the orchard and pumpkin vine. Drink cider to slow the numbness While summer and winter intertwine.
October 14, 2003
* * *
Elisha Webster STILL THANKSGIVING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
I, typecast as bookish from the very beginning, am abandoned to the sofa with a can of honey roasted cashews and my brother’s game boy.
Curled tight with Tetris, the bleep creaked from this old, hand held game makes a child out of me. A cascade of concentration, shapes fit to form, as I accomplish line after line of glorious Tetris dissipation.
Grandma leans across from me watching my wrists twist and frown around shapes that just don’t seem to fit. She wants “How are you?” “I am fine.” “How is school?” Wretched with resistance I bare the weight of her stare.
Preferring the kids’ table, where conversation’s small and flit like balls of bread or strips of turkey, where mouths chew open and fingers point out grandpa’s open fly, and Aunt Karen’s lipstick stuck, a squashed bug on her pearly front tooth.
I am grateful for the quiet of the sofa reserved for me, the ten year old introvert, nose in a novel, now awkward in an adult body.
We meet here every holiday. After dinner my uncle, the infamous loon, shell shocked and shaken from Nam, shuffles in slippers, a dribble of gravy down his stained, white shirt, mumbling Happy Holidays and fragmented commentary on the football game.
We meet in the quiet space sharing appreciation and reverence for its discarded, miscellaneous magic. The warmth of our silence tingles me drunk.
I am grateful for you, dear uncle, eyes muted, yet startlingly cool with reflection. He says he hates these things. I say nothing.
* * *
Kim Zdanowicz
MR. JOHN LEE HOOKER
Ain't nothin'
but what you feel
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