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poetry

Exploring The Metaphorist with Martin Settle

September 26, 2022 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Regular readers of my Storied Charlotte blog might remember last year’s post about Martin (Marty) Settle and his memoir titled Teaching During the Jurassic:  Wit and Wisdom from an Old Hippie Teacher.  Well, Marty has a new collection of poetry that Finishing Line Press just released.  Titled The Metaphorist, this collection looks at nature through a metaphorical lens.  For more information about this collection, please click on the following link:  https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-metaphorest-by-martin-settle/

I contacted Marty and asked him how he came to write the poems in The Metaphorist.  I also asked him if he would be willing to share one of the poems from this collection, which he generously agreed to do.  Here is what he sent to me:

This book of poetry comes, first of all, from my unending love of plants and animals. Over the years, I have become quite familiar with the flora, fauna, and fungi of our region. But these poems are not just any nature poems, but nature poems that are in line with current, ecological discoveries and philosophies. The themes of The Metaphorest fit into many of the new words and terms that are becoming salient in these times – Symbiocene, Wood Wide Web, Anthropocene, Grammar of Animacy, Mutualism, and Mycorrhizal Networks. My title is a neologism to add to this list of terms; metaphorest is a synthesis of metaphor and forest. The poems in this collection find delight not only in the existence of so many creatures but the metaphorical language that they provide us with. 

Of course, you know my writing roots are in Charlotte. Working at UNC Charlotte has provided me with many writing mentors – Robin Hemley, Robert Grey, Lucinda Grey, and Chris Davis.  In addition, Irene Blaire Honeycutt over the years with Sensoria has provided me with inspirational poets and workshops. Currently, Charlotte Lit has been a source of readers, workshops, and courses, from which I always come away renewed in my writing.

As to sharing one of the poems, how about this poem from the South.

Pokeweed in the South

in its early stages
pokeweed rises with
hands humble in prayer
as plentiful in spring
as a crop of Christians
at Easter service

then it can be cut
baptized in boiling water
and brought to the table
a poor man’s spinach

the ritual can be repeated
the pokeweed does not die
a horizontal tuber
buried in the ground
continues to send up shoots
an immortal that has saved
many from starvation

maturity is the problem
the crimson stems
grow as high as a human
and maiden hair racemes 
hang down with purple-black berries
that attract like a woman’s nipples 

desire comes in seeing the pleasure
of birds feeding 
and flying off with berries – 
mockingbirds, cardinals, catbirds
eat and sing poke 

but humans cannot
even grasp a stalk
without tainting their blood
to eat would be death
the only immortality in these juices
is to write with their ink
or dye with their stain

I appreciate Marty’s willingness to share his pokeweed poem with the readers of my blog.  There are several pokeweeds growing in my backyard, so I am familiar with this plant.  However, after reading Marty’s poem, I now look at pokeweeds in a whole new way.  Through his poetry, Marty helps us transcend our familiar world and celebrate with him the metaphorical wonders that he associates with the natural world. I congratulate Marty on the publication of The Metaphorist, and I thank him for his insightful and original contribution to Storied Charlotte’s poetry library.   

Tags: naturepoetry

Of Earth and Sky and Charlotte Poets

November 15, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

During the month of October, lines of poetry suddenly popped up in many locations in uptown Charlotte.  These poetic snippets were part of a larger multi-media project called Of Earth and Sky.  The brainchild of British installation artist Luke Jerram, this project originated in the city of Gloucester in the UK in 2020, and it is now touring the world.  Jerram envisioned Earth and Sky as a large-scale poetry installation in which he used lines from poems to form a temporary sculpture trail.  For more information about Jerram’s vision for this project, please click on the following link:  https://www.ofearthandsky.co.uk/

Of Earth and Sky made its American debut in Charlotte thanks to Blumenthal Performing Arts.  In preparing for the Charlotte version of this project, the project leaders and poetry curators associated with Blumenthal solicited original poems by Charlotte writers and then used lines from these poems for the installation in uptown.  Although the installation came down on October 31, 2021, the project lives on in the form of a newly published book titled Of Earth and Sky: Poetry Anthology 2021.  This anthology includes one poem from each of the 200 Charlotte writers who submitted their poetry to the Of Earth and Sky installation project. For more information about the anthology, please click on the following link: https://ofearthandskyclt.com/poetry-book/

The anthology begins with commentary by two of the project leaders.  Bree Stallings, the Director of Artistic Experiences at Blumenthal Performing Arts, describes that project as “a small moment of escape, a way of looking at our city, and ourselves, differently, and to remember we were all put on this world to draw metaphor where there is fact, and to make special the mundane.”  Boris “Buzz” Rogers, the Director of Creative Engagement at Blumenthal Performing Arts, explains that the leaders of this project “reached out to the entire city of Charlotte and asked its residents … to share their stories—stories of hope, happiness, sadness, love, loss and all the in-between.”

The poems in this anthology are rooted in Charlotte.  The poets touch on the experience of living in Charlotte during this current stressful time in our city’s history.  Some of the poems are deeply personal.  Some capture a special moment in time.  Some are spiritual in tone.  And some are specifically about Charlotte or places in Charlotte.  For example, Jamaal Cowan’s poem, “Heart of the City” is about the experience of sitting “at the corner of Trade and Tryon.” 

I think that all of the poets in this anthology rose to the challenge of sharing their stories.  The anthology comes in the form of one 145-page book, but in a sense, it provides 200 glimpses of contemporary life in Storied Charlotte.    

Tags: anthologyCharlotte poetspoetry

Lisa Zerkle and the Charlotte Lit 4X4CLT Poetry/Art Poster Series

October 18, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Charlotte poet Lisa Zerkle published a poetry chapbook a few years ago titled Heart of the Light.  It seems fitting to me that the word “light” is in the title, for Lisa has a knack for shining a spotlight on poets. In 2005 she co-founded KAKALAK: An Anthology of Carolina Poets, an annual collection that she went on to co-edit for a number of years. As the co-editor of KAKALAK, she enjoyed pairing the featured poems with artwork, and this experience caused her to come up with another way to spotlight the works of poets. In 2016, she brought the idea to Charlotte’s newly-created literary arts organization. With Lisa as curator, Charlotte Lit launched 4X4CLT, a poetry/art poster series involving the production and display of posters featuring poems and original artwork. She called it 4X4CLT because she pairs four poems with four works by local artists.

I’ve seen these cool 4X4CLT posters around town over the past few years, but I only recently realized that Lisa is the person behind this project. My curiosity got the best of me, so I contacted Lisa and asked her for more information about the 4X4CLT project.  Here is what she sent to me:

When I fell for poetry, I fell hard. But I was acutely aware that this love of mine was not shared by the public at large. When they thought of poetry (if they thought of it at all) it was something rhymed, something written by a dead person, or something they had to learn for a test. That didn’t square with the fresh, timely, heartbreaking, compelling work I came across every time I read a book of contemporary poetry or literary journal. If they could read what I was reading, I figured, they’d love it, too.

4X4CLT sprang out of this desire to share poetry in the community, to get it out of books and into the public arena. It’s a quarterly event that revolves around the release of a poetry + art poster series. Each set of four posters pairs the work of nationally known poets with art by local artists. The weekend of the poster release includes a poetry reading and master class by the featured poet. After the release, the posters are displayed in 100+ places around Charlotte—coffee shops, book stores, libraries, breweries, and the like.

This structure allows for a casual encounter with poetry, perhaps while waiting in line for coffee; or a deeper involvement of attending a reading or class. My idea was to create the kind of programming I myself wanted to experience. But over the past five years, I’ve been grateful for the extent 4X4CLT has been embraced by the public. Charlotte Lit generously gave the idea a home. The Knight Foundation and the ASC provided major funding. Many local businesses agreed to display the posters, and many volunteers have pitched in to help deliver them.

The release events are celebrations of poetry and art, hosted in venues as diverse as Resident Culture Brewing, C3 Lab, CPCC, and Queens University. Often, the local artists attend the release events and talk about their process. We’ve heard about weaving, sculpting, painting, and photography. Over the years we’ve been honored to feature poets Linda Pastan, Sandra Beasley, Lola Haskins, Sarah Lindsay, Jessica Jacobs, Nickole Brown, Tyree Daye, A. Van Jordan, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Matthew Olzmann, Maurice Manning, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jennifer Chang, Cecily Parks, Richard Garcia, Morrie Creech, Terrance Hayes; and two poets laureate, Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo. Just last month, the host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, Ada Limón, was our guest.

4X4CLT has been a labor of love, but the results have exceeded my expectations. As my own appreciation of poetry deepened, it’s led me to embark upon an MFA at Warren Wilson College. There’s one final edition of 4X4CLT this December. Our guest poet will be the newly minted MacArthur “Genius,” Reginald Dwayne Betts. He’ll give a reading at the Midwood International and Cultural Center in Plaza Midwood on Friday, December 3, and teach a master class on Saturday, December 4. Full details are here: https://www.charlottelit.org/4×4/

I wish Lisa all the best as she starts her MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and I am sure that she will go on to write new and inspiring works of poetry. However, as she turns a new page in her career, she should take pride in the success of her 4X4CLT project and her many other contributions to Storied Charlotte.

Tags: local artistspoetrypoetry and art

North Carolina Poets Respond to 9/11

September 07, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

The Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston once wrote, “In a time of destruction, create something.”  I thought about Kingston’s words of advice as I was reading the poems included in Crossing the Rift:  North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath, a new anthology co-edited by Joseph Bathanti, a former North Carolina Poet Laureate, and David Potorti, a co-founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.  The anthology includes works by 116 poets from across North Carolina, including many poets from the Charlotte area.  The contributors to this anthology all responded to the destruction associated with 9/11 by creating poetry.  Some of their poems are about loss—the loss of loved ones, the loss of landmarks, the loss of a sense of security.  Some of their poems are about the personal experiences of the poets on that tragic day.   Some of the poems are reflections on how the events of 9/11 have changed our lives, beliefs, and values.  All of the poems are moving in their own way. For more information about this anthology, please click on this link: https://www.press53.com/anthologies/1w771a3bujbgbwgm9ki563j09zpbs7

I first found out about this anthology from Joseph Bathanti.  He contacted me at the beginning of July and informed me that Press 53 would be publishing this anthology on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center Twin Towers, and we have been corresponding since then. I agreed to feature the anthology in my Storied Charlotte blog, and he agreed to send me more background information about the anthology and its Charlotte connections.  Here is what Joseph sent to me: 

Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath had its genesis in September of 2010, just prior to the ninth anniversary of 9/11. David Potorti, then the Arts Tourism Manager at the North Carolina Arts Council (NCAC), and I agreed to assemble a complement of poems to memorialize the tenth anniversary of 9/11. By June of 2011, we had concrete plans; and, in August of 2011, we sent out the call to poets across North Carolina: “to commemorate and acknowledge in poetry the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11 … a poem that in some way [touched] directly on the events of 9/11 or [reflected] associated themes of peace, hope, reconciliation, loss, etc.” The harvested poems were posted, in the order they arrived, each day leading up to 9/11, on the Poet Laureate section of NCAC’s blog.

In early January of 2021, David and I decided to revive and radically expand our earlier 9/11 project into a print anthology. The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 was approximately eight months off, so we had to move with dispatch. A few days later, we contacted Kevin Watson, editor and publisher of the brilliant Press 53 in Winston-Salem, and secured his enthusiastic pledge to publish the book. On January 31, David and I sent out the call to North Carolina poets requesting poems for the proposed anthology centered upon the original thrust of its much smaller digital predecessor, but that also took into account the exponential collateral fallout spawned by 9/11 over the past twenty years: Islamophobia, the vilification of immigrants and the undocumented, ramped-up xenophobia, nationalism and isolationism, two wars and supercharged military budgets that continue to impoverish our nation, as well as concurrent rises in homophobia, transphobia, virulent racism, and domestic terrorism. It was our hope that the invited poets would craft poems with those themes in mind and through the lenses of their experiences and lived lives, and in inimitable ways. The poems, from 116 poets, poured in from all over North Carolina and from extraordinarily diverse vantages and voices. The yield was extraordinary, wildly varied, uniformly moving.

A number of the contributors in Crossing the Rift are from Charlotte and those precincts surrounding it (including a robust cohort from Davidson): Tony Abbott, Peter Blair, Ann Campanella, Christopher Davis, M Scott Douglass, Brenda Flanagan, Irene Honeycutt, Stephen Knauth, Rebecca McClanahan, Tootsie O’Hara, Alan Michael Parker, Gail Peck, Diana Pinckney, Dannye Romine Powell, Gretchen Pratt, Julie Suk, Chuck Sullivan, Gilda Morena Syverson, Richard Taylor, Dede Wilson, and Lisa Zerkle.

I still number myself among these wonderful writers, since Charlotte, from 1976 to 1985, is where I cut my teeth as a writer. In 1976, newly arrived in Charlotte from my hometown in Pittsburgh, 23 years old – a brand new VISTA Volunteer with the North Carolina Prison System – I barged into the newsroom of The Charlotte Observer on Tryon Street downtown and presented myself to Dannye Romine, the then Book Editor for the Observer. I dreamt of a foothold as a writer, clawing for any kind of smiling encouragement and validation from the likes of writers as charitable, humble, and quietly luminous as Dannye. She delivered it in spades and has remained a powerful influence all these years. Central Piedmont Community College is where I first taught, and where Irene Honeycutt was its acknowledged virtuoso poet who taught creative writing. She magnanimously made space for me, a complete rookie, and eventually and so graciously allowed me to teach creative writing. I was in awe of Chuck Sullivan, a tough, gritty poet, a Northeast Catholic boy like me, who read his work so inimitably. Tony Abbott invited me to teach a prison literature course with him at Davidson College, encouraged me to keep writing, and advocated for me for the rest of his storied life.

Charlotte is where I had my first successes as a writer, where I was allowed to claim that mantle and not feel pretentiously unworthy (though I often felt unworthy), where I would go on to meet so many of the esteemed and kind poets mentioned above and call them my friends. Charlotte is where I initially discovered the glorious community of writers that exemplify the elegance and generosity that characterize the literary community of North Carolina.

I thank Joseph for providing the readers of my Storied Charlotte blog with his inside story about the editing of Crossing the Rift and for sharing his experiences as a young writer in Charlotte.  Today Joseph is the McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.  However, in my mind, he belongs to Storied Charlotte’s pantheon of poets.

Tags: 9/11anthologypoetry

Tanure Ojaide’s Narrow Escapes

April 10, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Tanure Ojaide is a well-known Nigerian poet, but he is also the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies at UNC Charlotte.  I met Tanure shortly after he came to UNC Charlotte in 1990, but it was not until last year that our mutual interest in poetry intersected.  Shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the editor of Exchange (a publication of UNC Charlotte’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) decided to run an article about the response of UNC Charlotte’s poets to COVID-19.  Tanure and I were among the poets the editor interviewed, and each of us had a poem included in the article:  https://exchange.uncc.edu/poets-reflect-on-impact-of-challenges-on-human-spirit/  In both cases, our poems were about taking walks during the quarantine, but our paths soon diverged.  Whereas I wrote just one poem related to the pandemic, Tanure went on to write an entire collection on this topic.  Titled Narrow Escapes:  A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic, this collection came out this month from Spears Books.  For more information about this book, please click on the following link:  https://spearsmedia.com/shop/narrow-escapes/

Tanure asked me if I would write a blurb for the book, and I happily agreed.  As I state in my blurb, Narrow Escapes is presented as a series of poetic diary entries, spanning from March 19, 2020, to October 31, 2020.  Each of the poems is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, but they vary in focus from the global impact of the pandemic to the very personal impact on one’s family members.  All of these poems pack an emotional wallop, but the personal ones are especially gut wrenching.  For example, the poem “When the Coronavirus Comes to the House” captures perfectly the anxiety and anguish that parents feel when their children are stricken by a deadly virus.  In many ways, this poetic diary has the feel of a verse novel, for there is a continuing narrative that ties these poems together. The poems in Narrow Escapes narrate the unrelenting progression of a global pandemic.  It is a narrative that we all are experiencing, and that is what gives this book its universal appeal.

I recently contacted Tanure, and I requested that he send me a statement about what prompted him to write this book.  Here is what he sent to me:

The poet is a restless human being whose reflexes are like antennae that respond to what is happening around. I have always known that no part of the world is separated from another and this connectedness has been strengthened by globalization. Thus, when there was the outbreak of the strange virus that turned out to be Coronavirus or COVID-19 in distant Wuhan, China, I had no doubt it would get to wherever there were human beings. It did not take long for it to get to Europe and watching the fatalities in Italy, Spain, France, and Britain, my anticipation became more real because of the connections between Milan, Madrid, Paris, and London and American cities. Within a week California and New York got the virus and the rest is familiar history.

Much as I used to refrain from jumping to write on issues or events as they unfolded, COVID-19 was a force that compelled my imagination to do something immediately. What else should a poet do than follow closely the spread, disruptions, fatalities, fear, near misses, and triumphs of this mysterious virus that doctors did not then know much about? It was current but its lasting currency intrigued me. As a global person, I follow happenings across the world. The heavy toll in northern Italy that I know through Milan and Bellagio told me that this was serious business. At a point, especially in late March through June, 2020, the trepidation was palpable. Doctors did not seem to know what to offer as treatment and many people who went to hospital died. Most of those who contracted it did not only die lonely but were gurneyed into cold trucks for mass burial as at a time in New York. For me, that was a threat that one should not take lightly. My family hunkered in religiously during the period of the lockdown.

What else could be more menacing as to move a poet to write than the entire world attacked by a tiny mysterious virus that behaved like a trickster? The pandemic offered me an opportunity to reflect on the vagaries of life and things. Why not write day by day as the charts of hospitalized folks rose to higher and higher peaks? The television stations and social media presented graphic images again and again that made nights riddled with nightmares. I often woke at night to jot down my reflections on the past day and my anticipation of what would come later that day. There was gloom but after some time there was a sense of defiance. What could be more poetic a subject than a dance of defiance against death in many narrow escapes? Some days, I had one entry or two or even three depending on Aridon, my muse. Each diary entry was like a dot in a circle and daily I added more dots to fill up the circle to make meaning about life. I was baring my heart as I tried to write entries that should communicate poetically. Unlike my earlier poems, there was barely a long poem in this collection. I was mobbed by images and thoughts of a global world which had taken for granted its confident development that it thought nothing could change its trajectory of progress. The poet loves this delusion of humans. COVID-19 levelled the world in a sense as developed and developing countries were equalized. The powerful and the weak faced the same threats and ironically a superpower nation led by an erratic president fumbled in handling the pandemic. For some act of fate up till now, Africa has not suffered close to what Europe and North America went through in fatalities.

The COVID-19 pandemic started from very far away. I knew it would come to the United States but did not foresee its coming to my home. It came really close to me. My lastborn son and daughter contracted it as they developed coughing and tested positive. Whether that was a fluke or not, I can’t tell because within three months my daughter caught it again and COVID-19 showed to us its ugliness as I never saw it from a distance with other people. She was in a ventilator for a day and those hours were the most traumatic I have experienced. She came out of the critical state and got moved to a step-down ward before being discharged for rehabilitation. It took her several months to get to relative normalcy even though she feels the side effects of  COVID-19 will remain with her for a long time. Imagine your family narrowly escaping a fatality and your suppressed jubilation and somber solidarity with others still mourning their loved ones!

Given that April is National Poetry Month, I thought it would be fitting to include one of the poems from Narrow Escapes in this week’s Storied Charlotte blog post.  I ran this idea by Tanure, and he kindly gave me permission to include the following poem:

We Are All Casualties

We knew people ambulanced to hospital

but did not return,

we know who returned on their own feet

but stunned to silence by their vulnerability;

we know those whose relatives or friends

either lost or won their personal battles.

All the while we have stayed at home.

It is not that distant despite social distancing—

those who grieve for the dead,

those who participate in muted celebrations,

and those who suffer enervating trepidations

from the fatalities trucked to mass graves

and the losses no words can convey.

Dead, positive, or negative

we are all casualties of COVID-19.

I think that Tanure is right when he says that we are all casualties of COVID-19.  This pandemic has had an impact on all of us, and as a result, we all can relate to the poems in Tanure’s Narrow Escapes.  Tanure’s newest poetry collectiondeals with a global pandemic, but at the same time, it relates directly to Storied Charlotte. 

Tags: CoronavirusCOVID19pandemicpoetry

Allison Hutchcraft, Henry David Thoreau, and the Art of Nature Writing

December 14, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

I first read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or Life in the Woods during my high school years in Colorado.  There’s a pond on mountainside where I grew up, and I decided to emulate Thoreau and write about the pond, just like Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond.  I perched on the bank for about an hour, watching the occasional dragonfly zip through the cluster of cattails near where I sat,  and then I got restless.  As much as I admired Thoreau’s writing, I realized that I lacked the discipline and powers of perception to be a nature writer.  Still, I appreciate writers who are attuned to the rhythms of nature and who can help us understand our place in the natural world. One such writer is Charlotte poet Allison Hutchcraft.  For more information about Allison and her poetry, please click on the following link:  https://www.allisonhutchcraft.com

I met Allison about six years ago.  At the time, she had just had a poem published in the Kenyon Review about a dodo bird.  I remember reading the poem and then talking with her about her ability to make readers care about an extinct bird.  I have followed her career ever since and have taken pleasure in seeing her poetry gain national attention.  I am pleased to report the recent publication of Swale, Allison’s first poetry collection.  I contacted Allison and asked her for more information about her collection.  Here is what she sent to me:

I’m thrilled to share that my first poetry collection, Swale, was released this November by the good folks at New Issues Poetry & Prose. The book looks outward to the natural world, and also inward to the landscape of the mind. In Swale, water and land meet and mix, and at times become confused. Sailors hallucinate the ocean as a field. Ancient coastal forests, having fallen into the sea from shifting tectonic plates, reappear on a beach, unburied by erosion. 

In my work, I often find animals appearing, from bears, horses, and lambs to whales and manatees. In Swale, there are extinct species, too, particularly the dodo and Steller’s sea cow, which went extinct roughly in the 1680s and 1760s, respectively. Human intervention set in motion those extinctions, and I’m interested in thinking about those losses, and the kinds of worldviews that made them possible.

In 2018, I was lucky to be a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. Sitka is a dream of a residency, and quite remote: perched where the Salmon River estuary spills into the sea, and steps from a national scenic research area. I saw more elk than people. Being in that particular place—walking the woods and coastlines, climbing over boulders, touching rockweed, lichen, and driftwood—was incredibly generative, and brought forth poems that grew incrementally from daily observations. Such writing in the field is crucial to me. At the same time, I love research. Reading about the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, led me to the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller’s study of the sea cow, which in turn led to a poem.

I am particularly interested in the ways in which art and science meet and what questions and conversations such crossings might foster. I often think of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, in which he advocates for finding ways to bring the disasters of the Anthropocene into our shared consciousness. Nixon writes:

“In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world?”

This, to me, is an urgent call: how can we begin to make visible the precariousness of our world? Poetry, I think, offers one way to do so.

Even though Allison’s Swale is a work of poetry while Thoreau’s Walden is a work of prose, both writers have much in common.  For both of them, nature writing is an immersive act.  Both are keen observers of the dynamics of the natural world, and both reflect in profound ways on how humans interact with nature.  Both have an appreciation of place, and they communicate their appreciation of place through the power of their writing.  In many ways, Allison Hutchcraft is Storied Charlotte’s own 21st-century Thoreau. 

Tags: Nature writerpoetry

T.J. Reddy: Charlotte’s Own Civil Rights Activist, Poet, and Artist

June 06, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

As I reflect on the on the recent demonstrations and protest marches in Charlotte and the rest of our country in response to the killing of George Floyd, I am reminded of the life and legacy of T.J. Reddy, one of Charlotte’s leading civil rights activists.  Reddy died on March 31, 2019, but he and today’s protesters are all part of a longer struggle for social justice.  As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  For the purposes of today’s Storied Charlotte blog post, I want to take a moment to reflect on T.J. Reddy’s role in this larger story. 

I first met T.J. Reddy in 1986.  I had recently purchased the house where my wife and I still live, and my mother gave me an antique Swedish print as a house-warming gift.  I decided to get the print framed, so I brought it to a nearby business called Ready Art Shoppe.  The sign said it specialized in “Quality Custom Framing and Afro American Art.”  T.J. owned the business, and I ended up having a long conversation with him about the print and the importance of honoring one’s ancestors.  I explained to him how the print was tied to my mother’s Swedish ancestors, and he showed me some examples of art tied to his African ancestors.  He did a beautiful job of framing the print, and it still hangs in our dining room.   After I picked up the print, I told Ann Carver (one of my colleagues in UNC Charlotte’s English Department at the time) about my interactions with T.J.  She then informed me about T.J.’s background as a civil rights activist, poet, and artist.  Ann retired many years ago, but she and I are still in contact.  I invited her to share her memories of T.J for this blog post, and she sent me a moving essay (see below).

Thomas James “T.J.” Reddy was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 6, 1945.  He moved to Charlotte in 1964 to attend Johnson C. Smith University, and the next year he transferred to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he studied history and creative writing.  While a student at UNC Charlotte, he became involved in various civil rights activities and protests.  He and two of his fellow activists (known as the Charlotte Three) ended up being arrested on dubious charges, and 1972 he was sentenced to a twenty-year prison term. The case drew national attention with Tom Wicker, a New York Times columnist, calling it a “miscarriage of justice.”  In 1979 Governor Jim Hunt commuted T.J.’s sentence. 

During the 1970s, T.J. focused much of his creative energy on his poetry.  In addition to publishing poems in various literary journals, he published two collections of poetry:  Less Than a Score but a Point came out in 1974, and Poems in One-Part Harmony came out in 1979.  In the words of poet and critic Skylark Aberjhani, Reddy’s poetry “provides unsettling snapshots of the impact of racism and poverty on the psyches of African-American children. … Ultimately, however, [Reddy’s poems] are defined by the qualities of political outrage balanced with spiritual contemplation and romantic inclinations that inform his aesthetic sensibilities.”

T.J. continued to write poetry throughout his life, but in the 1980s he began focusing his attention on the visual arts.  He opened the Ready Art Shoppe in 1982, and in the late 1980s, he studied painting at Winthrop University.  As a visual artist, T.J. aligned himself with the social realism movement.  His art often deals with difficult topics, such as incarceration and police violence, but he offers hope for a better future. In many of his paintings, T.J. celebrates teachers.  When talking about his art, he frequently expressed his desire to provide children with positive examples of caring and responsible adults. 

In the summer of 2017, the Projective Eye Gallery at UNC Charlotte Center City sponsored a retrospective exhibition of T.J.’s work titled “Everything Is Everything,” which included both his poetry and his paintings.  After viewing this exhibition, I came away feeling in awe of T.J.’s ability to integrate his commitment to the civil rights movement with his passion for the poetic and visual arts. 

“Everything Is Everything” was T.J.’s last major exhibition, but his art continues to touch the lives of young people.  One of his paintings is on display in the main stairway of UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library.  It’s titled “The Child as an Open Book,” and it depicts a mother and a child reading a book together.  I think it is the perfect image to capture T.J. Reddy’s many contributions to Storied Charlotte.

Remembering T.J. Reddy

By Ann Carver

When I met T.J. he was painting, working to make positive change in Charlotte’s African American communities, and actively opposing the Viet Nam War. At a community center, he was counseling young African American men about how to avoid being drafted.

Just after a local riding stable refused to allow him and some friends to ride because of race, the stable burned and horses died in the fire. T.J., Dr. Jim Grant, and Charles Parker were charged with the crime. Both T.J. and Jim Grant were well-known civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists. Neither of them knew Charles Parker well.

At their trial, it became clear that the men were being tried for their political views and activities, not for the charge of setting fire to the barn. The prosecution brought no physical or forensic evidence. They claimed to have found a bottle with gasoline at the site, but the bottle had somehow been lost. They brought in “witnesses” to testify, both of them unknown to the defendants, both of whom were convicted felons who had made deals with the prosecution for lower sentences in exchange for their testimony.  The prosecution constantly referred to them as dangerous militants and with other negative politically charged terms. T.J., Jim Grant, and Charles Parker all had solid alibis for the night and time of the fire. None had any prior record, and both T.J. and Jim Grant were known to have non-violent philosophies of protest and activism for positive change.

Nevertheless, they were judged “guilty” and sentenced to prison. There were so many irregularities and flaws in the prosecution’s case that it seemed inevitable their appeal for a new trial would be granted. It was not. They were sent to prison. As one appeal after another was denied, and when the same exact formula was used in Wilmington to charge and convict another UNCC student, Ben Chavis, and 9 other young black political activists, it became undeniably clear that a formula to convict black political activists on trumped up charges was being tested in North Carolina.

T.J., Dr. Jim Grant and Charles Parker became “The Charlotte 3,” and Ben Chavis and the other 9 young men in Wilmington became “The Wilmington 10.” The North Carolina Political Prisoners Committee was formed, and we worked tirelessly for years until their freedom was achieved when North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt commuted their sentences in 1979.

During the time T.J. was incarcerated, his wife and members of the N.C. Political Prisoners Committee took picnic lunches and visited him every week on visitors’ day, regardless of weather. We realized his life was in constant danger from those who wished to silence him and the others. T.J. and also Ben Chavis were suddenly moved a number of times, without allowing them to notify anyone, from one prison facility to another. It was important that those in authority knew people were watching so that nothing could be done in secret and go unnoticed. While in prison, T.J. continued to paint, using the materials at hand: dirt, grass and other plants, gravel, crayons and pencils. He taught other inmates how to read, and he helped inmates properly file appeals and other legal documents. T.J. also completed his M.Ed. degree through UNCC in 1977.

When T.J. was at last released from prison, he devoted himself to developing his art, teaching and working with youth in the African American communities, working with students and faculty at UNC Charlotte, working with the African American Cultural Center, writing poetry and storytelling.  T.J.’s beautiful, masterly crafted, and powerful art speaks for itself. I have donated my collection of T.J.’s paintings, which I collected over the years from the time we first met, to the UNC Charlotte Atkins Library. It is available for exhibit and study.  Through the legacy of his community work and his art, T.J. made, and continues to make, a difference.  He was my friend.

Tags: activistAfrican ancestorsartcommunitypaintingspoetrystorytelling

In the Words of Two Charlotte Poets

April 02, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Charlotte’s community of readers and writers is reeling as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.  We have seen the recent cancelations or postponements of Sensoria, the Center City Literary Festival, many library events, and a number of book signings and readings by local writers.  However, the coronavirus cannot stop the National Poetry Month, which takes place each April (https://poets.org/national-poetry-month).  It is fitting, therefore, that Christopher Davis and Grace Ocasio, two of Charlotte’s most prominent poets, are launching new poetry collections this month.  Davis’s Oath is being published by Main Street Rag (https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/oath-christopher-davis/), and Ocasio’s Family Reunion is being published by Broadstone Books (http://broadstonebooks.com/Grace_C_Ocasio.html).  I contacted Davis and Ocasio and asked each of them to send me a brief statement about their connections to Charlotte.  I also asked each of them if they would provide a sample from their new collections, and they both agreed.

Here is what Christopher Davis sent me:

I moved to Charlotte in August of 1989, newly hired by the English Department at UNC Charlotte to teach creative writing workshops.  My first collection of poetry, The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, had won the 1988 Agnes Lynch Starrett award from Associated Writing Programs, an organization bringing together creative writing programs, and writers, within academia.  The book was about to be published by Texas Tech University Press.  I had grown up in Los Angeles, received a BA in English Literature from Syracuse University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  I had taught creative writing for two years at Murray State University in western Kentucky.  I was 29 years old, and my life up to that point had seemed already full of adventure, trauma and insecurity: eleven years earlier, my younger brother had been murdered; my parents, both academics themselves, had subsequently gone through a difficult separation and divorce; as a young(ish) gay man, I felt the presence of the AIDS crisis, as did everyone who was experiencing it personally at that time, in complex, hard-to-compartmentalize ways.  I self-identified as a poet, and as an “arts” person in general, very strongly.  My first impressions of Charlotte, when I came to UNC Charlotte for an on-campus interview in February of 1989, were that it seemed like a lush, sunny, sensual, almost tropical kind of place.  It reminded me of the Wallace Stevens poems I loved, such as “In the Carolinas” and “Bantams in Pine-woods.”  Western Kentucky had been exciting too, to my suburban southern Californian eyes, but it was a landscape of wildernesses, whereas Charlotte contained cultivated gardens filled with day lilies and hosta, and crepe myrtle trees planted by the city along the Plaza, where I rented a small house throughout the 1990’s.  Hurricane Hugo hit, and my first days of teaching at UNC Charlotte were marked by, well, what I was used to:  adventure, trauma and insecurity.  Later in 1989, when the gorgeous flora in my front yard lost its flowers and receded into the ground for winter, I was so upset, assuming I had done something wrong, maybe not watered the plants enough, not fertilized anything.  My first spring here, in March of 1990, was a fabulous revelation.  I watched the day lilies burst out, the pear trees pop alive; I listened to Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” in my Walkman; I excitedly worked on poems that would eventually appear in journals, then in my second book, The Patriot, published by University of Georgia Press in 1998.  “One swollen evening / warm rain flooded the gutters. / Dogwood blossoms had come out / over a wash of green leaves. / The world seemed quietly willing.”  I was home.

Much time has passed since then, but, because I have remained in one place for half of my life, always responding to seasonal and historical events, always bringing my sensory experience, my body, my place, into my poems, it somehow seems as if no time has passed, like a “grace dissolved in place,” as T.S. Eliot names that feeling in his poem “Marina.”  Of course Charlotte has gifted me, and my poetry, with much imagery, language and experience.  But I think this poem, which will appear in my forthcoming collection, Oath, published by Main Street Rag Press, is most representative of my creative life, as lived in this part of our country, for so long.  In 2007 I received a grant from UNC Charlotte to support scholarship; I spent one week, in late January, at a hotel at the far end of Wrightsville Beach, in the Wilmington area; I wrote pages and pages of notes, and over several years shaped this poem.  If “that’s all she wrote,” I’m happy!

SHELL ISLAND

It’s weathered subject matter, this boutique hotel,

a revamped Holiday Inn at the end of a sand bar      

pulled this way and that, eroded by wind, rain,

currents, tides flooding the inland waterway.  

To restore expensive real estate, bulldozers

added three thousand more feet of beach

a little to the north, destroying habitats

for plovers, black flyers, sanderlings.

White water fowl wings

skim breaking waves.

*

An Adirondack chair the burgundy of dried blood

hunches against the rusty railing of the balcony. 

My muscles are already beginning to atrophy. 

Really do resent having to sit here, solitary,

slaving over rough drafts, shifting, shrinking,

when the sound of the surf pounds outside.

My heart, you know, feelings, needs to be

touched, doesn’t yours?  My neck hurts, 

my sharp nose and tight-lipped mouth

floating between my shoulder blades.

*

This human mike, this hollow, fragile body,  

a community perceptual center, embraces

it, this inside voice, radio free me, carries

it through books, buffet lines, museums;                                                        

in a pornography outlet beside Autumn Inn,

a care facility for seniors, it makes it moan.

Sun-bleached driftwood looks bone gray.

Well, I guess I am here on an arts grant,

i.e., to mix work, dying, and play. 

Pray, let’s wave at, never away, 

*

that obese sex tourist, trudging, in flip-

flops, along the boardwalk, two gay

Thai guys, twins, performing an act

behind his back, bowing, grinning,  

their four middle fingers lifted, tips,

bending in, slightly, wiggling, like

hooks catching trapped laughs,

flipping, “quote, unquote,”

the bird, supernatural,

rhetorical, rhapsodic. 

Here is what Grace Ocasio sent me:

As far as I was concerned, Charlotte was a foreign land, and I was a hardcore New Yorker when I moved to Charlotte in 1993, newly wed from the burbs of Westchester County.  The only thing I knew about Charlotte was that my mother had passed through it one time, years before she migrated to New York with my father and that my uncle, Dr. Arthur Grant, had received a B.A. in English from Johnson C. Smith University.  I truly became, upon learning from my then fiancé, Edwin Ocasio, that his company, Hearst Corporation, would be relocating to Charlotte the summer of 1992, like Eva Gabor’s Lisa of Green Acres fame.  “The stores” I implored as I conversed with Eddie long distance ten months before our wedding.  For sure, the asphalt jungle had rooted itself deep in my DNA, and no amount of persuasion on Eddie’s part was going to sell me on Charlotte.  Hence, I went kicking and screaming down south. 

Little by little, Charlotte grew on me.  Teeming with nature galore, the birds and trees of various kinds won me over.   All the writers I met wrote about flowers.  What is this? I wondered.  True, the amazing contemporary poet Thomas Lux taught me in a Sarah Lawrence College graduate seminar that one could use flowers symbolically, creating great potency of language.  One need not imbue one’s language with the literal meaning of flowers, I learned.  Still, I imbibed what the writers around me wrote, admired and appreciated their verse.  I, however, referenced nature in order to reflect/mirror my emotions.  The death of my mother in 2008 prompted me to write about her passing aided by the image of a dogwood.  Other poems emerged, some relating to nature in one way or another. A few of these poems made their way into my new collection, Family Reunion.  Nowadays, I sit or stand in my bones, content to wait for small moments to burgeon into poems.

FALL FESTIVAL

We, my Edward and I, take Zoe to a pumpkin patch

where she dives into a horde of pumpkins

as though they will draw her close

as cousins she’s never met.

She commands the hayride––

first child to scramble up

into the tractor-drawn wagon,

first child to throw a bucket of hay over her head.

We walk through a meadow, snatch wildflowers,

cram our pockets with them,

lean against white oaks and watch the sun

slide down the sky like a child racing down a water coaster.

We flash our headlights from Mooresville to Charlotte,

letting people know harvest is the time to gloat

over chill in the air, the snap of grass under feet,

the scent of pumpkin buttercream,

the yellow, red, and orange leaves of tupelos

that entice us to sleep even when we’ve been up all night,

tossing stray sandman thoughts out the window

or in the trash can in our backyard.  

I thank Christopher Davis and Grace Ocasio for sharing their thoughts and poetry and for their many contributions to Storied Charlotte.        

Tags: Charlottepoetpoetrypoets
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