116
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER: “[HER] WORDS ARE GATES SWINGING WIDE OPEN” by Tara Powell Adapted from a tribute at the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference Banquet
“Some words / are gates swinging wide open,” wrote the honoree of the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference.1 Indeed. Just such words opened a new chapter in my life twenty-five years ago, when a manuscript copy of Wildwood Flower made its way into my hands via my ninth-grade English teacher, who had met and shared work with a poet named Kathryn Stripling Byer at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching.2 I’ve written about this for the Arts Council website, how Kay Byer and Alma, the figure at the center of that manuscript, blew my tiny little mind open. Alma’s voice showed me a whole different notion of what poetry could be and put me for the first time in search of what Alice Walker has called “our mothers’ gardens.” And then the poet herself dynamited the rails by actually writing back to me when I sent her an admiring letter and (I’m embarrassed to admit) some of my own scribblings, trying to express what her work had meant to me. She was kind and encouraging: she sent me a copy of her first book and told me I could make friends with the girl in it. When we finally met in person years later, she gave every impression of actually remembering me. This story hardly matters tonight, except that so many among us could tell one like it. Whether the poet remembered me or not, I remembered her. Kay Byer’s words opened the gates for my teacher and for me that summer twenty-five years ago and for countless other writers and readers since then. “What is the world but our song,” ponders the girl in “Cornwalking” (Girl 5). In a more recent poem, an older woman speaks of “want[ing] to give [her]self over to green,” and asks, “Where are such beautiful words // when we need
them?”3 I can answer that. I and many others have for decades turned to Kay’s beautiful words in joy and in affliction. In North Carolina’s famously generous harvest of writers, there is no one more generous, no one more kind, no one more beloved of our community – not an easy shawl for a truth speaker to wear, and indeed those are waters Kay is more willing to wade in than most. Her alter ego in The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest speaks of “com[ing] a long way / from what’s been described as a mean and starved / corner of backwoods America” (3), and, in Descent, another speaker describes “a kindling that transforms whatever it touches / to pure sound,” a “song where I’m kindling a fire / for my fingers to reach toward” (1). “Just one spark,” another poem reads, “That’s all she ever wanted” (Descent 13). A spark, a song, green of honeysuckle and wisteria, “a web of voices” catching light.4 Kay’s work kindles our world. “Just pick a word / and then wait,” a teacher advises in her poem “Correspondence.” “Like a leaf spinning / round in a backwater, / sooner or later it catches the current.”5 In Michael McFee’s admiring essay in The Napkin Manuscripts, he describes Kay’s work as “song-cycles of survival” (158), and I thought of that phrase when I read the close of her song-cycle “Lost.” The speaker asks, . . . Let me open my mouth, knowing this is my end of the bargain, this yearning to say Here I am but am not. (Descent 22)
1
The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (Lubbock: Texas Tech, 1986) 3; subsequently cited parenthetically.
3
Descent (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012) 7; subsequently cited parenthetically.
2
Wildwood Flower (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992).
4
Byer’s phrase “web of voices” is quoted in Michael McFee, The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2006) 158; subsequently cited parenthetically.
5
Catching Light (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Stare UP, 2002) 24.