Interview with poet Kathryn Stripling Byer
Posted by Robert
Kathryn Stripling Byer is the former poet laureate of North Carolina. She has published five poetry collections, most recently Coming to Rest (Louisiana State University Press). She's also one of those rare poets who have a business card.
Coming to Rest is a great collection--even has two Halloween poems. Here's one of my favorites:
Coastal Plain
The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,
the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak
limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind
stroking the flat
fields, the flat
swatch of corn.
Far as anyone's eye can see, corn's
dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky
or as water
that won't remain water
for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer
of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield
to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots
and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night
soil of what we call
home. Home that calls
and calls
and calls.
*****
What are you up to?
Just now I've been reading online Eavan Boland's essay in the May issue of Poetry, finding her description of the two contradictory ways of being a poet extremely helpful. With my term as North Carolina's first woman Poet Laureate coming to a close, I've felt the pull of the private grow stronger and stronger, even as I never doubted the importance of the position I held as Laureate. It's rejuvenating to find an essay giving voice to what's been milling around inside my own head, giving it context, both literary and historical, so that I can say, "Yes, I understand the lay of the land a lot better now." The two seemingly antithetical "types" exist in most of us, I think, and I know they do inside me. One minute, get me out of here, then the next, what can I do to bring more North Carolina poets to public notice?
Having finished Boland's essay, I'm now worrying about the tomato plants in our garden. Two of them aren't thriving and one of the heirlooms is being nibbled by something. Rabbit? Raccoon? This afternoon I will hope to get back to some of my own work, print it out, scribble on the pages for a while. I've a new manuscript I'm hoping to place, Descent, which takes me back to the landscape of the deep South from which I came. And what must be dozens of notebooks scattered all over the house containing drafts of poems, essays and stories--I have to track them down! I'm hopelessly disorganized.
You were the poet laureate of North Carolina from 2003 to 2009. What were your responsibilities as North Carolina's poet laureate?
I was told at the outset that I could write my own job description. Well, with Fred Chappell as your predecessor, that's not going to be easy. Fred set quite a high standard, and I knew I was going to have to work hard to meet it. Mostly I wanted to help make poetry accessible in as many ways I could, whether to other poets (we have so many in our state!) or to readers, students, teachers, anyone at all who cared to listen to me on my soapbox.
Right away the Literature Director of the NC Arts Council, Debbie McGill, and I began a web page on the Council site devoted to NC writers, with a poet of the week, new books section, and news. Finally we had to give up the week by week poet; it was a lot of work to keep that going. We moved to a Poets of the Month, and finally to a quarterly web page. I decided to set up my own laureate blog to facilitate what the Council was trying to do, especially now with the budget freeze in place.
So, what else did I do? I wrote occasional poems for libraries, events, really, all sorts of requests. One, even, for someone's 60th birthday! I visited classrooms, gave a lot of readings, answered a lot of e-mails, and wrote a lot of blurbs. I'd say my job description was "always available." I was always trying to track down new voices to share with an audience. Although the council can't afford to search for and select a new laureate till state finances improve, they've asked me to continue the blog, which I'm happy to do. Working on it gives me a lot of satisfaction.
How important do you feel community is for poets?
So many of us, of a certain generation anyway, have embedded in our imaginations the image of the solitary poet, the Romantic standing alone on the summit, brooding over the world below and its connection with the world inside. At the same time, we know that poets need each other, just as they always have, maybe now more than ever, and they need to feel that they are part of their own communities, where they become involved in the cultural and political life of that community. I've tried myself to become involved in various issues important to me locally—the new library, for instance, writing a poem for the groundbreaking, letters to the paper and so forth. The moratorium on new development in our county drew me into writing guest editorials as well as poems.
We are lucky to have a local weekly that cares about such things. The larger newspapers are turning away from their literary pages, even their guest editorials. I know the internet is picking up a lot of the slack. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. I've just joined Facebook after keeping my distance for a good while. I was warned by a friend, "You will be falling into a black hole." So far I'm still ok, and I'm discovering that I can post news there about my latest laureate features and other literary matters of interest to me. The definition of "community" is changing, no doubt about that, and I still prefer face to face community, but I'll use what I can to make the case for poetry.
North Carolina may be the best state in which to live if you are a writer. The NC Writers Network was begun nearly 30 years ago, and it has worked hard to bring real literary community to the state, a state that for so long had its regions strictly marked—mountain (where writers got little notice), Piedmont (Mecca, as we used to call it) and eastern/coastal, as isolated as the mountains. Now, thanks to NCWN and umbrella organizations like Netwest, among others, I can say that the whole state is Mecca. It didn't happen overnight. It took years of ground-breaking by good people, like Debbie McGill of the Arts Council, Marsha Warren and her stalwarts at NCWN, and all the local folks who came together to form their own literary organizations. Writers need each other and they need to feel a connection with their readers and future readers. It's fine to stand on a mountain-top and brood—I've done that myself--but we have to come back down again and live in our communities. Let our voices be heard.
In Coming to Rest, location factors into several poems. How important do you feel location is to a poet?
I firmly believe a poet has to feel located somewhere, in some physical place where light falls on the ground, the earth grumbles and sings, the leaves fall, the sewage stinks, and so forth. "You have to be from somewhere before you can write about anywhere else," as Fred Chappell, our resident genius, once said. Or as Flannery O'Conner said, "Our limitations are our gateways to reality." My gateway literally squeaked, rusty and old, there was pig-stink all around, my people were hard-scrabble farmers, but it was a way into my first poems. And from there, I could go anywhere. Anywhere!
You work in relationships with your daughter and husband in first person narrative poems. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction?
Sometimes it’s hard to know where to draw the line. I let the poem itself guide me. The poems drawing in daughter and husband in Coming to Rest were different in that personal inclusion. So many of my earlier poems had been "persona poems," where I could work out any inner narratives through a fictional character--the mountain woman named Alma, for example, or the aging Evelyn. James Dickey's famous statement, "Poetry lies in order to tell the truth," seems apt here, as does Richard Hugo's, "You owe reality nothing, your emotions everything." What I mean is, you fictionalize, you improvise when you come up against what you can't or can't yet say or may never want to say outright. Yes, let's don't forget Dickinson's, "Tell the truth but tell it slant." There are ways of getting around reality into a poetic reality. The poem itself has seemed to draw the line for me when I am paying adequate attention to language and craft. The reality in a poem is, finally, language and how it is used.
How do you handle the submissions process?
Right now I'm not submitting much at all, though I'm happy to oblige if an editor asks me to submit some work. Otherwise I'm dealing with the day-to-day business of being wife, mother, daughter, laureate, friend, and as you see, at the bottom of the list, poet. But can't poet be intertwined with all of the above?
I used to be diligent about the submissions process, keeping records, reading Poets & Writers faithfully, but I came to find the process taking up so much energy—what to send where and when, then the irritation (that's putting it mildly) of rejections, the envy of seeing friends with poems in magazines that had rejected my work, and so on. It began to be tiresome. I'm ready to try again, though, with the new work I've done over the past few months. I've been in P0-biz for 40 years. I still get a thrill from having poems accepted, and I still get pretty testy when they are rejected. I don't want to think of myself as over and done with. I simply won't, and that's all there is to it.
Why do you write poetry?
It's the best way I know to sing with the world. And because I couldn't be Renee Fleming or Emmy Lou Harris. Or Nina Simone.
Who are you currently reading?
Stacked at my bedside are books by Mahmoud Darwish, Tomas Transtromer, Zbigniew Herbert, Sandor Kanyadi, Chitra Divakaruni, Marie Ponsot, Adam Zagajewski, and Nazim Hikmet. I pick up one of them on any given night. Chitra's novels, of course, I read straight through, but I enjoy going back to favorite passages. I'm especially fond of her The Vine of Desire and the novel that comes before it, Sister of My Heart. I'm staying away from most American poetry at the moment, but not NC poetry. You can read my laureate blog to see that I'm keeping up with that.
If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?
I'll have to go with what Maxine Kumin told me years ago, "You have to be stubborn to make it as a poet." That advice was for a young poet struggling to see her first book published, but I think it still stands. By "making it," I now mean keeping it going, growing, digging in your heels and saying, "Here I am." We are a youth obsessed culture, including our literary culture. But women of a certain age like me must keep on keeping on. Living in the South, being thought "regional" by the literary powers-that-be doesn't help. But it doesn't hurt, if you pay them no mind.
It may seem paradoxical that to keep moving, you dig in your heels and stand your ground, but poetry can deal with those paradoxes. All of art can.
*****
* Check out Kathryn's North Carolina Poet Laureate blog at: http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/
* Check out Kathryn's personal blog at: http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/
* Learn more about Coming to Rest and LSU Press at: http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress
*****
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Wednesday, July 08, 2009 12:24:27 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00) 
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