Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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2020 CALDWELL AWARD WINNER JAMES W. CLARK, JR., NORTH CAROLINA’S “JOHNNY APPLESEED OF THE HUMANITIES” COURTESY OF NC LITERARY HALL OF FAME
For his exceptional contribution and integral role in youth development and public education in the state of North Carolina, Professor James W. Clark, Jr. has been awarded the 2020 John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, the most prestigious honor bestowed by North Carolina Humanities. For nearly sixty years, Dr. Clark has had an ongoing essential role in promoting the humanities and public education in North Carolina. After completing his bachelor’s degree in English at UNC Chapel Hill, followed by a master’s and PhD in English from Duke University, Clark served as an English professor at NC State University under Chancellor John Tyler Caldwell, for whom the award is named. Together, Clark and Caldwell worked to promote the humanities through work with the North Carolina Humanities Council, the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and other humanties organizations in the state. Clark has also been instrumental in the development of 4-H camps for youths throughout North Carolina, serving as the lead on committees to establish them for the advancement of education. For this work, he was inducted into the National 4-H Hall of Fame. As a strong believer in free and accessible education, Clark has volunteered in promoting 4-H records and outreach, produced a series of social studies text-
books, taught literary history seminars, and worked for the digitization of free educational materials for students. Robert Anthony, curator of the North Carolina Collection at the Wilson Special Collections Library, has referred to Clark as “the Johnny Appleseed of humanities in North Carolina.” This year, the Caldwell Award ceremony was hosted virtually by the North Carolina Humanities Council. The keynote address, presented by Dr. Christie Hinson Norris, Director of Carolina K-12, will be published in the 2021 print issue of NCLR. In the meantime, watch the ceremony here. n
ABOVE James W. Clark, Jr. accepting his induction into the
North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, Weymouth Center, Southern Pines, NC, 7 Oct. 2018
‘I’ll be all right’ so often / it was clear he would not be.” In “Dark History” he reflects on the longstanding national sense of entitlement we’re paying for now: “The dirt, the grass, all earth was ours to take. / This was the myth that seasoned us. Rivers, / trees, coal, would be infinite forever. / We could laugh at those who thought such things holy.” Maginnes is too honest, though – too free of hubris – to offer himself as an all-wise authority, and he’s willing to foreground the limits of his understanding. Part of his authenticity as a prophet-poet lies in that very humility: in the poem “America,” he writes, “Sometimes when I think of America these days, I recall / the used car where I stood one afternoon, looking deep / into the unknown land of an old engine, seeking the source // of a strange noise I could hear but could not name.” Nevertheless, as someone willing to confront hard truths about himself, Maginnes is equally willing to take a hard look at his homeland. In one of the
longest poems, “Surviving the Storm,” he tells the story of a neighbor’s tree that fell into his yard, and as the poem concludes he makes fairly explicit a metaphor he’d been gently developing all along: When the rot that swallows the cracked trunk of the tree’s republic sets its claws,
when it spreads enough
that the body falls to time and gravity, how long will we trace the snarl of roots torn from the dirt-womb and splayed before us
until
we understand that what killed the tree did not invade. It was born there.
Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift offers some of the best work by a poet worth celebrating – and worth heeding, too. n