78
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FROM THE SENSORIUM a review by Robert W. Hill Joseph Bathanti and Ted Wojtasik, eds. The Collected Poems of Ronald H. Bayes. Laurinburg, NC: St. Andrews University Press, 2015.
Oregon native RONALD H. BAYES is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, NC. Bayes earned a BS and MS degree in English and education from Eastern Oregon State University. Bayes has been the recipient of many awards, including the North Carolina award for Literature in 1989 and the North Carolina Writers’ Network award for lifetime achievement in literature (also named for Ronald Bayes) in 2002. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014.
own flesh – all types of poetry as ways in to all types of experience. If “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches,” one could do worse than be a lifelong teacher of a hugely eclectic body of poems to students and other poets, a teacher whose academic vocation infused his massive body of poems, and vice versa. I have resisted the temptation to cherry-pick favorite lines and – that other temptation – simply to mine and quote other poets to help explain what I have discovered for myself in Bayes, engaging in piecemeal consumption – like cigars and Jack Daniels in the kitchen before a poetry reading among knowledgeable friends. I discovered that the fragmented approach I first took with these poems – “knowing how way leads on to way” – is not really at odds with many of Bayes’s poems. In “Tokyo Annex: Passus 9,” passing thoughts are given form and permanence. Even not-saying – or not saying quickly – becomes
Read about JOSEPH BATHANTI in a review of his latest book later in this issue.
ABOVE Inductee Ronald H. Bayes at the North
PHOTOGRAPH BY JAN G. HENSLEY
ROBERT W. HILL was born in Anniston, AL, raised in Charlotte, NC, and is currently a resident of Hunnington, WV. Hill received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UNC Chapel Hill and a PhD from the University of Illinois. He has taught at Clemson University, Kennesaw State Unversity, and Marshall University. He is the author of numerous literary essays and reviews, and his poems have appeared in such literary magazines as Cold Mountain Review, Minnesota Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, and Southern Review. He was a finalist in the 2014 and 2015 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition, and his poems can be read in NCLR 2015 and 2016.
I have read Ron Bayes’s work only piecemeal over the years, a fact I am not proud of, having been reared in Charlotte and schooled at Davidson and UNC. So when The Collected Poems of Ronald H. Bayes (selected and edited by Joseph Bathanti and Ted Wojtaski) came my way to review, I welcomed the opportunity to see his poetry as a whole. Perhaps strangely, I have consumed that six-hundred-plus-page book piecemeal, but not so willy-nilly as it may sound. I have read and re-read it as I now read Scripture, or Moby-Dick – knowing that the whole is simply, fully worthily there, but that my own interest in books of poetry has always been the poems – the individual poems. And, with a master, an honorable practitioner at hand, I have read all of them out of “order.” My first take was to read whichever poems fell on a fiftieth page (50, 100, 150, etc.) – a dozen or so poems to begin. What I found was, in some ways, a history of twentieth-century poetry. Modernist, Beat, confessional, surrealist, even LANGUAGE poetry, almost everything but neoformalism, I’d say. And I suspect that many of these poems would fare well with good readers at poetry slams. Some of the compendium sequences, Tokyo Annex and the Porpoise poems (see “Umapine Tetralogy II [A poem in 4 sections and in 32 books]”), even smack of associative epic after the fashion of Pound’s Cantos. Bayes’s range is impressive, and it affirms his position as a teacher of poetry, one who has come to incarnate – take into his
Carolina Literary Hall of Fame Induction ceremony, Southern Pines, NC, 12 Oct 2014