{"id":27813,"date":"2012-03-20T13:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T17:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=27813"},"modified":"2012-03-20T14:14:10","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T18:14:10","slug":"two-poets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/20\/two-poets\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Poets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From 1993 to 1995 I stumbled in two graduate programs, first economics and then religious studies. I was undone by advanced calculus and cultural theory\u2014couldn\u2019t handle the rigor of either, the puzzle of value unsolved. The abstract challenges of school were leavened by my job at Quail Ridge Books<\/a>, an independent store in Raleigh. There, I shelved hardbacks and backlist paperbacks by Baldwin, Banks, Berger, (Amy) Bloom, Boland, Gass, Grumbach, Gurganus, Le Guin, L\u2019Engle, Malamud, McCarthy, Mitchell, Munro, Walker, Wideman, (C.D.) Wright, (Charles) Wright, (Richard) Wright; I managed the magazines and literary journals, worked the cash register, and made friends with the customers.<\/p>\n

I met the late Don Adcock<\/a> there. A jazz flute player and the longtime band director at North Carolina State University, he first heard bebop in 1945 when he stepped off a battleship in San Francisco and wandered into a joint where Howard McGhee was playing. Fifty years later he would walk into the store and instantly identify whichever jazz musicians were playing on the house stereo\u2014Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Al Haig, Dexter Gordon, Zoot Sims, Lee Morgan, Bunny Berigan\u2014and he knew all the songs, too. He often visited the store with his wife, the poet Betty Adcock, who taught at the local Meredith College as well as at Warren Wilson. Don and Betty became critical sources of encouragement for me as my writing developed, and I spent many afternoons at their Raleigh home\u2014a modern, postwar structure with a flat roof surrounded by heavy woods.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Over a similar period of years the poet Claudia Emerson, too, spent many hours in the Adcock living room, after driving down from her home in central Virginia. In her new book, Secure the Shadow<\/a><\/em>, she writes about the room in a poem dedicated to Betty:<\/p>\n

\n

The rear wall of her house all glass, the garden
defined the living room with its small stand
of paper birches, a narrow stream, the hillside
that confined it\u2014all quick with flight and shadows
of flight\u2014cardinals, thrushes, juncos, doves,
sometimes a heron, a hawk. She said
the birds must believe, if belief applied in such,
that the mirrored trees were ahead when they flew
into the reflection that was her house,
unaware that what killed or stunned was more
than glass\u2014the misdirected flight we all
take sometimes into the place just left behind. (from \u201cJubilation\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I remember Betty mentioning Claudia\u2019s name long before she won a Pulitzer Prize for her book Late Wife<\/a><\/em> in 2006. I never met Claudia herself until Don Adcock\u2019s memorial last year; I spoke at the service, and Claudia read the Dylan Thomas poem \u201cFern Hill.\u201d In January, when Betty told me that Claudia was coming down from Virginia for three days\u2014just the two of them, reading their latest work to each other, drinking tea in the daytime and wine at night\u2014I inquired about stopping by to chat. They invited me. I took a tape recorder, and we sat in the living room.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Betty was born in 1939 in San Augustine, Texas, a town of two thousand people.<\/p>\n

\n

Losing ground, this obscure East Texas county\u2019s
gone into its past like a withering plant,
its one town shrinking inward, root-cut. (from \u201cRare\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She met Don in 1956, in Deming, New Mexico, where he was teaching high school music. She was in boarding school in Dallas at the time, but after a year of long-distance romancing, they married and spent the summer in New York City. By day, Don renewed his teaching certificate at Columbia; at night they trolled clubs like Birdland and the Village Vanguard. Later, they settled in Raleigh, down the road from his hometown of Durham. They moved into the house where Betty still lives.<\/p>\n

I asked Betty what odds a young female poet faced in 1960s North Carolina.\u00a0\u201cPoetry,\u201d she said, \u201chad a hard time gaining traction among women writers in the South. Part of the reason is that there were so many good models to follow in fiction\u2014Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Flannery O\u2019Connor, Eudora Welty, Doris Betts. They were like comets. But the poetry world was controlled by the universities in the South, and women didn\u2019t have access to the faculty lounges and English departments back then. I never considered myself a feminist poet, as it were, because I don\u2019t write out of that drive. But perhaps my work helped change the way the Southern experience is seen in poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Claudia came across Betty\u2019s work in 1992, when she was teaching a Southern literature course and realized there were no Southern women poets in any anthologies. A colleague handed her Betty\u2019s 1988 book, Beholdings<\/a>.<\/em> \u201cThe first poem in that book,\u201d Claudia said, \u201centranced me like an opening track on a good record. It was long, several pages and it had her trademark fusion of cultural, historical, and personal elements.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

After this kind of death, sudden and violent,
there\u2019s difference forever in the light.
Here\u2019s the sun I\u2019ll see from now on
aslant and keeping nothing
in its backward look. I have become rich
with disappearance. I have become this light
pooled now on my father\u2019s desk,
his grandfather\u2019s\u2014rolltop sturdy as a boat
and ice-locked in a century of deepening afternoon.
I have to open it and take the cargo on
myself. There\u2019s no one else. (from \u201cClearing Out, 1974\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cBetty\u2019s work gave me permission, in a sense, to do what I do,\u201d Claudia added. \u201cShe is never bored by anything. Her intellect is fierce and wonderful. She affirmed to me that poetry can come from anywhere, and a woman can have a slightly different way of seeing, a different angle on nature, or a family, or history, or an old desk. Her work also indicates that you should know something about the world\u2014history, science, geology.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Betty what she heard in Claudia\u2019s work. \u201cWhen I first read Claudia\u2019s poetry,\u201d she said, \u201cI was impressed by her vivid physical presentation in lyric and narrative, image, metaphor, the senses. That\u2019s not fashionable, but it\u2019s what I loved about her work. I\u2019m thinking of her poem \u2018Bait Man,\u2019 about a paraplegic man who sells worms and minnows and crickets. It\u2019s Southern gothic turned to a different purpose. She uses some of the same lush, intense, passionate language that most of the poets I loved use\u2014Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Dickey, Theodore Roethke, Robert Penn Warren.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Secure the Shadow<\/em>, something dies in just about every poem (Claudia\u2019s brother, her father, calves, hogs, birds) and things are abandoned (asphalt roads, gas stations, motels, swimming pools). The title poem is about postmortem photography; elsewhere, a young woman\u2019s tattoo on the inside of her wrist, \u201cabove her pulse,\u201d is mistaken for stitches. The book conjures rich, abundant images of death and decay that evoke the photographs of Sally Mann<\/a>, another native and resident of central Virginia whose recent work has focused on old landscapes, corpses, and the vagaries of illness.<\/p>\n

Claudia\u2019s spry, casual manner belies the melancholy of her work, reminding me that a half century ago Tennessee Williams and Yukio Mishima agreed<\/a> that the American South and Japan shared a blend of \u201celegant\u201d and \u201cbrutal\u201d natures.<\/p>\n

I left Betty\u2019s house late in the afternoon and drove twenty-five miles through January\u2019s early dark to my place in Chapel Hill, traversing a region transformed in recent decades. An NHL hockey arena now sits just two miles from Betty\u2019s place and I headed past it going west on Wade Avenue.<\/p>\n

Claudia didn\u2019t begin writing until she was twenty-eight (she\u2019s fifty-five today). Before that she carried mail on an eighty-six-mile rural route in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, where her family goes back several centuries. Recently, she tried to retrace the route, but the fields, forests, and built structures had changed too much for her to be sure. Delivering messages from that landscape and culture, though, remains the core of her poetry, as in \u201cFlocking Theory,\u201d from her new book:<\/p>\n

\n

At dusk each winter evening, in the half hour
Before they must relinquish sky to night,
starlings quicken, flock in forms\u2014symmetries
shifting\u2014the likenesses so fast and fluid
I can\u2019t hold on to any one before
it dissolves into another, and I
have taught myself to accept the seamless
recreations not as uneasy
whimsy but as the musings of a lucid soul
or the disclosures of God: the wind
itself made seen, the shade a shadow casts.
No one knows for certain what controls this,
the flock moving by space measured and kept\u2014
strict distances\u2014between the bodies.
But the birds, I like to think, are having
none of theory, anyway, whatever
it may be, none of me, abandoning
themselves instead to the invariable
bliss of what is, the fact of flying
manifest in every changing figure:
one enormous wing, a waterfall
of bees, a murmurous curtain falling
to rise as smoke, a funnel cloud,
helix, an arm, its empty sleeve.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sam Stephenson is the author of <\/em>The Jazz Loft Project<\/a>. He is currently at work on a biography of W. Eugene Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From 1993 to 1995 I stumbled in two graduate programs, first economics and then religious studies. I was undone by advanced calculus and cultural theory\u2014couldn\u2019t handle the rigor of either, the puzzle of value unsolved. The abstract challenges of school were leavened by my job at Quail Ridge Books, an independent store in Raleigh. There, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[6733,6726,6730,3529,6734,6725,2453,6723,6738,6735,330,6728,4443,6724,1267,6727,6729,1524,6736,6731,6737,6732],"class_list":["post-27813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-beholdings","tag-betty-adcock","tag-birdland","tag-carson-mccullers","tag-clearing-out","tag-don-adcock","tag-dylan-thomas","tag-fern-hill","tag-flocking-theory","tag-gothic","tag-jazz","tag-jubilation","tag-katherine-anne-porter","tag-late-wife","tag-pulitzer-prize","tag-quail-ridge-books","tag-rare","tag-sally-mann","tag-secure-the-shadow","tag-the-village-vanguard","tag-virginia","tag-wudora-welty"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTwo Poets by Sam Stephenson<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 20, 2012 \u2013 From 1993 to 1995 I stumbled in two graduate programs, first economics and then religious studies. 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