North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts
N C L R ONLINE
9
BY JAMES APPLEWHITE
Alone on the Holiday Campus The airliner arrows an urgent aspiration its idea elsewhere my slow walk a circuit. A winterward willow-oak engraves the silvering air with infinite particularity its stasis like motion.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Bound into a diurnal round I pass with gifts and regrets – many students, colleagues, flights that poetry still brightens my mindscape this horizon a calligraphy, a history, my heights and depths, the regrets not paramount, the mind’s delight I helped ignite around me like stars discerned in a day that’s not yet ready to dim, not quite while these winter trees ink light.
Untitled, 2016 (digital/mixed media, 10.5x10.7) by Paul S. Kelly, III
JAMES APPLEWHITE is Professor Emeritus of Duke University and a regular NCLR contributor. His numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Jean Stein Award in Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Associated Writing Programs Contemporary Poetry Prize, and the North Carolina Award in Literature. In 1996, he was elected to join the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and in 2008 he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Read more about the poet in Rob McDonald’s interview with him in NCLR 2016 and read more of his new poetry in NCLR 2017.
Durham native PAUL S. KELLY, III is pursuing a BFA with a concentration in graphic design in the School of Art and Design at East Carolina University. This piece was created for the NCLR / Student Art Collaboration Competition, organized by NCLR Art Editor Diane Rodman and ECU Art Professor Joan Mansfield. From thirteen submissions in response to this poem, Rodman selected Kelly’s for publication because “It made me look at a poem I thought I knew very well and see so much more. Now I am thinking as deeply about the image as I am about the poem; each illuminates the other. I’m paraphrasing an art critic who once said about art if it doesn’t take me anywhere, if it doesn’t tell me something new, it’s not art. Paul’s work is art.” Interested in art and design from an early age, Kelly notes that he hopes to use his “ability in art as a vessel to speak for and to a generation and culture of people who don’t usually get an opportunity to express themselves.” Post graduation, he aspires to a career as a creative director, with plans to eventually start a design agency of his own.