Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
N C L R ONLINE
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Kathryn Stripling Byer, FORMER NC POET LAUREATE RECEIVES SECOND ROANOKE-CHOWAN POETRY AWARD Photograph by Anderson D. Orr
NCLR congratulates Kathryn Stripling Byer on her 2013 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award for her fifth collection of poetry, Descent (Louisiana State UP, 2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013). This is her second RoanokeChowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association: she also won in 1998 for Black Shawl (reviewed in NCLR 1999). In 2012, she received the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s R. Hunt Parker Award for her significant contribution to North Carolina literature. In 2012, too, Byer was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame after serving from 2005 to 2009 as Poet Laureate of North Carolina. See NCLR 1996, 2008 and 2010 for poetry by Byer, NCLR 2007 for Kristina L. Knotts’s essay on Byer’s Wildwood Flower (1992), NCLR 2008 for James Smith’s interview with Byer, and NCLR 2011 for Byer’s interview with George Ellison. And read a short story by this poet in NCLR 2010. n
above Kathryn Stripling Byer, City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC, Nov. 2013
your name, [Atamasco, is] hiding your poison.” The last two stanzas are shadowed by that secret poison: “You are danger, deep-throated cup.” Twenty of the poem titles contain that ambivalent “dear.” “Dear Snakeskin,” for instance, and “Dear Melancholy.” The intention is ironic, of course. “Dear” may be used here almost in the same sense as when we say “Oh dear!” or “Dear me!” when the Scottie once again bites the postman. It is an unfortunate happenstance – but what can be done? In this sense, the repeated use of “dear” indicates a resigned, rueful, reluctant acceptance of the conditions of existence. It is akin to another habit of Southern speech. “Aunt Matilda is an alcoholic shoplifter,” we might say, and then add, “Bless her heart.” Or, “Uncle Haywood is the most incompetent businessman and baseball coach I ever heard of, but I reckon he does the best he knows how.” If my conjecture about “dear” is close to Meyers’s intention, then we would not expect to find here
poems of ecstatic jubilation, of unbridled passion, or of darkest despair. No hymns to Apollo or Elvis, no heartbroken laments for Dylan Thomas or Adonais. The tonality throughout is in the middle range of an odd major key – the mixolydian mode, so to speak. My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass stands, then, as an intimate book, speaking to and of some of the most customary of our feelings. But it is not a personal intimacy. The most important thing we know about the poet is that she shares the feelings most of us have most of the time. And she is able to observe them and to give them a voice with numerous shades of inflection and intonation. She is, we might suggest, prepared to be unprogrammed. “Red Hills” begins with this line: “I come to these hills ready to be lost.” Richard Eberhart wrote that he would like to “live at the pitch that is near madness.”2 Susan Laughter Meyers chooses to live in a state where, always, poetry is prepared to happen. n 2
Richard Eberhart, “If I Could Only Live at the Pitch that Is Near Madness” (1977).