48
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
photograph by peat burnett
HOMAGE to
number 22
Presentation Remarks by Jeffrey Franklin, NCLR Poetry Editor
JAMES APPLEWHITE
2012 recipient of the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration
Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming East Carolina University 21 September 2012 Watch the presentation of the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration to James Applewhite, including this and other words of tribute and the poet’s response and a reading.
I’m a native Tennessean, and I spent four years in Chapel Hill and, later on, four more years in Greenville as an English professor at ECU. North Carolina is part of who I am. Now I’m an expatriate Southerner living in Colorado, but for going on fifteen years I have had the privilege of serving as the Poetry Editor of NCLR. That privilege has allowed me to continue to be a removed cousin in the family of North Carolina literature, which has given me the further privilege of remaining in touch with a poet as accomplished as James Applewhite. For this I am grateful to NCLR and especially to Margaret Bauer, who has made ECU a homecoming homestead for the North Carolina literary family. Thanks to all of you for affording me the opportunity to say a few words in homage to James Applewhite and his poetry. The fewest words I could choose would be these three: fidelity, balance, mastery. Jim’s poetry has maintained fidelity to the themes, places, people, and reflections that have pervaded his work from the beginning, though of course he has
Above James Applewhite accepting the Roberts Award for
Literary Inspiration and reading from his poetry at the Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, 21 Sept. 2012
taken on other themes along the way. Those themes include, but are by no means limited to, heritage, family, and the “historical anachronism” of Southern culture and sensibility, the “atavism of place that’s blood deep,” as Jim puts it in a 2003 interview.1 These stanzas from his poem “Documentary,” from the collection A Diary of Altered Light,2 beautifully condenses themes that occupy his body of work: We suffered a Sunday light, so ideal we could not act within it, only exist as a tribute to its history, only feel
a judgment-glare persist
through seasons of mules and tobacco leaves, Thanksgiving parlors, black men harvesting in chiaroscuro – perspective that deceives,
1
unfathomable by remembering.
Todd Verdun, “An Interview with James Applewhite,” Carolina Quarterly 55.2 (2003): web.
2
James Applewhite, A Diary of Altered Light (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006).