Betty Adcock's 'Widow Poems' -- 'conversations shredding in the wind'

Almost four years ago, Raleigh poet Betty Adcock lost her long-time husband, Don, a jazz musician. His death has changed her life, of course, and over the ensuing months, the poems began to come. Poems, she says, that were "hard to write, hard to live through," and the book, she says, "has changed her, too. I care much less for some things and much more for other things than I used to."
 
Now her chapbook "Widow Poems" (Jacar Press), $12.95) from which the following is taken.

The Widow's House

seems to be coming apart -- pieces
of wall, snatches of a rug, chair-rungs,
shingles, plumbing, lamps and doorknobs.
Glass shatters from rows of still-framed 
faces. The mirrors are dusking over,
no longer disclosing.

                              Everything floats
as if gravity has left the place. It's not
violent; it is a loosening, a soundless
disengagement. Even her body has become 
otherwise, flesh that can no longer
recognize itself.

Perhaps it is she who has gone to ash,
gone to ground and the dark.
She has asked so hard for him,
crying out in the night, weeping into
pots on the stove, roses in the yard.

Perhaps she is the ghost 
in the house they built dissolving,
turning now as if in the grip of a slowed
tornado, air full of what could be
confetti in some kind of decelerating
celebration: music, books, conversations
shredding in the wind that memory
always becomes -- unfastened, recasting,
disheveling as the end of lovemaking.
She sits on a splintered floor
surrounded by the done-for.

Betty Adcock is the author of six collections of poetry from LSU Press. She has taught for many years at Meredith College in Raleigh and most recently at the low-residency Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers in Swannanoa, N.C. To order the book: Jacarpress.com

How Louise Shivers got her own 'baby' out of jail

Louise Shivers - NY Times photo

The death of  novelist Louise Shivers is old news now, but for me, it's still the saddest news of the summer. The Stantonsburg (N.C.) native died on Saturday, July 26, in Evans, Ga., of congestive heart failure. She was 84. Margalit Fox in her obituary on July 28 in the New York Times called her a "conjurer of (the) rural South."
Yes, she was that. And more.
I was serving as book editor in 1983 when Shivers' first novel, "Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail," appeared among the hundreds of books that spilled in each week for review. I noted the blurb from Eudora Welty on the back cover ("With this absorbing first novel we meet an author richly endowed and sure of her way.") Welty only blurbed two or three novels during my 17-year-stint on the book page. The other was Kaye Gibbons' "Ellen Foster," and before my time, Walker Percy's "The Movie Goer."
So I packed up the 136-page novel for a closer look.
Shivers was so in command of her story that as I read, my real world collapsed, and I was transported to 1937 and the tobacco fields of Eastern North Carolina. It was a riveting story of love and lust, of betrayal and tragedy. But what lifted the novel was Shivers' wisdom in giving us also a story of insight and transformation.
She knew well of what she wrote.
I interviewed Shivers over the years, and always she talked about the trap that women keep themselves in, often a trap of their own making. Shivers herself was in that trap, she told me. "I was raised to be quiet and submissive. The husband brings home everything, and you do what you're told."
The publication of that first novel at age 54 -- and the awards and accolades that followed -- helped to change all that. Shivers told me that her relationship with her husband had grown stronger.
"What a terrible thing to do to a man," she said, "to throw all that responsibility on him and set him up as a god and as a father."
Part of her trap, Shivers said, was spending two decades denying her urge to write. She had married after one year at Meredith College, and by age 24, she'd had three babies. But by 1967, when the "babies" were teenagers, she said that yearning to write "had just been suppressed as long as it was going to be suppressed."
By 1979, she had a manuscript to submit to a writers' conference, and it won first place. Novelist Mary Gordon happened to be the judge, and she recognized a true writer. Shivers quit her job in the library in Augusta, Ga., and put herself on a schedule to finish the novel.
Sad enough that Shivers is no longer among us. But so much sadder had she not followed her dream and thereby sprung that genius of a talent right out of that dark, cramped jail.
  

McCrory bypasses N.C. Poet Laureate selection system

Big surprise.

Gov. Pat McCrory announced Friday that he's chosen a new poet laureate for the state of North Carolina to serve as "ambassador of North Carolina literature" for the next two years.

She's Valerie Macon of Fuquay-Varina, a New York native, a graduate of Meredith College and long-time North Carolinian with two collections of poetry, "Shelf Life" and "Sleeping Rough."

Both are chapbooks published by Old Mountain Press of Sylva, a company that advertises it's been "assisting authors (to) self-publish their books since 1992."

Macon has won awards from the N.C. Poetry Society, the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series and the Writers Guild, Inc.

The surprise?

Only that McCrory completely by-passed the time-honored process of selecting this prestigious position, which includes a state-wide call for recommendations to the North Carolina Arts Council. The nominated poets then have sent a portfolio that included poems, a vision for the position, awards, publications and honors. In recent years, a committee of poets appointed by the Arts Council, has studied the portfolios, voted on the nominations and sent its recommendation or recommendations to the governor.

Traditionally, only then did the governor officially appoint the new poet laureate.


Macon will succeed Joseph Bathanti, who has served as poet laureate for the past two years.

I'll have more as the story unfolds.