-Zach

One of my old poems was recently published in Kid Spirit Online and I would love it if you took a minute to check it out!

Happy Holidays!

-Zach

http://kidspiritonline.com/2011/10/the-things-that-passed/

Ann Blocker Fleming Deagon, born in Birmingham in 1930, graduated magna cum laude from Birmingham-Southern in 1950 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. In 1951 she received her MA in Greek from UNC-Chapel Hill, and her PhD in Latin in 1954. From 1953 to 1961 she and husband Donald worked with “Unto These Hills” in Cherokee, NC. After teaching at Furman University 1954-56 they joined Guilford College, Donald as head of Drama until his death in1985 and Ann retiring in 1992 as Hege Professor of Humanities and Writer in Residence. Their daughters Andrea and Ellen were born there and graduated from Guilford. Ann taught overseas in Naples,Athens, and London, and was visiting professor at Elon College and Kalamazoo College.

Her serious writing began in 1970, and in 1974 Carbon 14 was published by U. Mass. and Poetics South by Blair. Indian Summer came out from Unicorn in 1975, Women and Children First from Iron Mountain in 1976, and in 1978 Godine published There Is No Balm in Birmingham, reissued by St. Andrews in 1997. No Balm had won both the Brockman Book Award and the Oscar Arnold Young Award.

Ann edited “The Guilford Review” 1976-1984, and her NEA Literary Fellowship in 1982 enabled her to broaden the scope of Poetry Center Southeast, which was set up in 1980 to house readings, workshops, and conferences for the Greensboro Writers’ Club, students, and townspeople. Here plans were laid for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, for whose members Ann still does critiques. She also served as president of several literary organizations and did residencies at Bread Loaf, Yaddo, AtlanticCenter for the Arts, and Weymouth.

In the 80’s Ann turned to fiction: Winthrop College published The Flood Story as its chapbook award in 1981, Green River Press brought out her short story collectionHabitats in 1982, and in 1984 her novel The Diver’s Tomb came out from St. Martin’s. Water Mark Press’s Breakthrough Award in 1985 brought publication of her experimental prose work The Pentekontaetia. Donald Deagon died in 1985, and Ann’s last book The Polo Poems was published by U. Nebraska in 1990.

Now she began a new life as a wanderer, actor, and singer/songwriter. Her publications—some 200 in some 100 magazines and anthologies—had brought her invitations to read and run workshops in a total of 20 states, but now she began to travel more widely, not just to England, Italy and Greece: to India on a Fulbright Seminar; to Egypt and back to Greece with her daughter Andrea, mid-eastern dancer as well as classics professor; and to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Estonia, and Russia singing tenor with the Choral Society of Greensboro.

After retirement in 1992 she acted with various community theatres, worked in film in Wilmington and with independent film makers, and modeled with a local agency. For several years she performed with “The Wise Cracks,” a collective of disorderly elderly women. She continues to perform occasionally at coffee shops, bars, bookstores, churches, festivals, retirement homes, art galleries, etc. Her songs are equally diverse, ranging from blues to folk to country, from social commentary to passion to the frankly bawdy. She has to be careful what she sings where.

At 81 she finds herself sustained by family—now including three grandchildren—friends, and the wider community of the arts, which has honored her with the Fortner Award from St. Andrews, dedication of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s “Pinesong,” this weekend’s celebration of her life and work, and the future promise of naming her Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for 2011-2012.

JOSEPH BATHANTI was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He has BA & MA degrees in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Bathanti came to North Carolina as a VISTA Volunteer in 1976 to work with prison inmates. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.

Bathanti is the author of six books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; This Metal, which was nominated for The National Book Award, and won the 1997 Oscar Arnold Young Award from The North Carolina Poetry Council for best book of poems by a North Carolina writer; Land of Amnesia, from Press 53 in 2009; and, Restoring Sacred Art, from Star Cloud Press, winner of the 2010 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association for best book of poetry in a given year.

His first novel, East Liberty, winner of the Carolina Novel Award, was published in 2001 by Banks Channel Books in Wilmington, NC. His latest novel, Coventry, winner of the 2006 Novello Literary Award, was published by Novello Festival Press in Charlotte, NC. They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina’s Visiting Artists, 1971-1995, his book of nonfiction, was published in early 2007. His collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2006 Spokane Prize, was published by Eastern Washington University Press in Fall 2007.

Bathanti's poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, The Cincinnati Review, New Letters, The Progressive, Manhattan Poetry Review, The Nebraska Review, Carolina Quarterly, America, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, The Sun, North Dakota Quarterly, The Texas Review, California Quarterly, West Branch, Southern Humanities Review, South Dakota Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Poetry Review, The Hollins Critic, Tar River Poetry, South Carolina Review and many others.

His one-act play, Afomo, won The Wachovia Playwrights Prize, The Playwrights Fund of North Carolina Prize and was produced by the Lab Theatre of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in short fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction.

He is the recipient of Literature Fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1994 (for poetry) and 2009 (for fiction); The Samuel Talmadge Ragan Award, presented annually for outstanding contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina over an extended period; a Fellowship from The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry; the Bruno Arcudi Literature Prize; the Ernest A Lynton Faculty Award for Professional Service and Academic Outreach; the Aniello Lauri Award for Creative Writing (in 2001 and 2007); the Linda Flowers Prize; the Sherwood Anderson Award; the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize; the 2011 Donald Murray Prize and others.

I remember you saying you were working on a book of poetry. Can you tell us about it?

Sure. Like perhaps so many young writers in their early thirties, I've been working on a full-length manuscript of poems, a first-book. It's a two-part project, the first portion being composed of shorter poems, the second half dedicated to a sequence of lectures/elegies. I'm still writing poems for this book, while at the same time working on other poems (though it is common for poems from different projects to intersect). It's easy to be impatient in this current climate about publishing something fast – getting it out quickly, as it were – but I'm trying to be patient, to let the poems arrive in the way they need to. With the elegy I think this is particularly important as your task is historically a moral one. That is, to sing of the dead. In the end, I think each poet is given to know when their work is done, either in the completion of a single poem or the conclusion of a longer body of work.

What poetry are you reading now?

Newer stuff? Merrill Gilfillan's terrific collection Undanceable. A book which hasn't gotten a lot of press but which is a stunning little book of lyrics published by Flood Editions (who produce some of the most interesting and beautifully designed books of poetry I've seen recently). Frank Bidart's Watching the Spring Festival is astounding and very real to me. Recently, Randall Jarrell. As a Californian, I never spent much time with his work, probably because his name never came up with any frequency among my friends and teachers (or I just wasn't paying attention). Ed Skoog's recent Mister Skylight. Always there is Wallace Stevens lying around.

Which novel is on your nightstand?

Salvatore Scibona's exceptional The End.

What inspires your poetry?

Well, William Carlos Williams is famous for saying that poetry comes from the mouths of the Pollack Mothers – and Lorine Niedecker, famous too for suggesting that poetry flowed almost "dreadfully" from the mouths of the pressmen with whom she worked – and while I don't know many Polish mothers or hang out in many newsrooms, I'm bound to agree. Working different jobs puts you in contact with a variety of people, all of them with different patterns of rhetoric and speech. I don't see poetry as being responsible for "transcribing" such speech – the poet is not a stenographer – but rather it puts the poet, anyone really, in a position where they feel speech to be as fundamental as that, that close to being. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger sees language as the "house of being" and I'm wont to concur with that too. Arguments for and against, voices of expertise, law, logic – whether you're a carpenter or lawyer – regardless of their rules or aims, this is important speech in which we are trying against odds to connect, to make sense of each other. Idiom, figure of speech, even clichés– these are the tenuous connections and agreements we make on a daily basis. There is something to be said for them.

As for myself, I haven't been drawn to the descriptive retelling of personal narrative in my poems – I never really have been. Say, for instance, I go for a walk and see a bird I've never seen before, or, maybe conversely, I witness a car accident on my way home from work: these "facts" haven't ever really made the poem for me. They may be beginnings or endings (if they prove themselves to be, if they assert themselves) but usually aren't the issue. But such events inspire thinking about a variety of things, and problematic thinking at that. Thinking which can tend to collapse on itself. The poem itself then becomes a structure (a house, a vessel, maybe) which is capable of ordering or establishing at least a provisional stability in which this thinking can exist. I like for the poem to almost break under its own weight, like a measuring tape you feed out until finally it folds over. To cantilever. To be near collapse. Collapse means you're close to something dire, that you're approaching things in a meaningful way. And some poems more than others. Not all of them will have the same ambition, and that's fine. Having said all that, season and landscape are perhaps most important to me. The coast of California where I grew up, the new terrain of North Carolina which I more recently inhabit. Seasons are not merely phenomena, but also ways of thinking and believing. I find my summer and fall work to be of very different characters.

When did you first start writing?

Yikes, let me think. Well, probably when I was 13 or 14. From that point on, I had several amazing English teachers in high school who encouraged us all to try it. I remember writing an imitation of Yeats in his Celtic Twilight period my sophomore year. You know, all that faerie imagery, bands of warriors riding, trout-fishing, et cetera. I remember laying on my bed writing it the day before it was due. And I remember feeling it become more than an imitation– it was an imitation, but I was suddenly invested in it. I wanted it to sound good. Even the having of such a simple ambition is memorable. That's one story of how it began.

Which poets inspire you?

Many. Close friends. People in workshops I've been in. The old Roman heartbreakers like Horace and Catallus and the new heartbreakers like Robert Hass, Linda Gregg, and Carl Phillips. My teachers along the way: Stuart Dischell, Jennifer Grotz, Linda Gregg, Arthur Sze, and Linda Gregerson. Shelley is quite inspiring, I think, for his willingness to believe it all. John Ashbery for his wisecrack-ery. George Oppen for his gravity. Creeley for his joyousness amidst heartache. Past poets who retain a quiet presence in the landscape – they are known but perhaps not read as much – Paul Blackburn, John Wieners, Gilbert Sorrentino to name a few. My partner, Sarah Rose, who writes beautifully and insightfully about family. My sister, Katie, who is a poet close to my heart. My sister Molly, a radio journalist who thinks like a poet, though her occupation wants the facts from her. There is always something inspiring when you look closely, even if you find yourself deeply at odds with it.

Do you have a favorite poem? If so, which one?

It changes. Favorite poem read today: "The Climber in the Ice" by Meghan O'Rourke, perhaps because I just recently saw Nordwand, a recent German film about the great Toni Kurz's failed ascent of the Eiger in 1936.

Do you have any advice for aspiring poets, especially student poets?

Maybe to go back to the cantilever/measuring tape analogy: put yourself in a bit of danger. And I suppose I must say, to be sure: not physical danger or harm. But it will be tempting to (and you will) write about emotions which are both scary and fascinating for their scariness. Wilderness. Writing is a safe way to investigate these states. You may be surprised by what you find in it, if you give yourself permission.