Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

For all of us who read our work in public - here's a great piece by Joe Mills, a fellow Press 53 poet and a truly excellent workshop leader and reader. We owe it to our audiences to be as practiced and prepared as any other performing artist.

I've been reading a lovely book of poetry, "Living Above the Frost Line,"and it's become essential preparation for my trip this week to the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia. You see, I'm living out of the mountains for the first time in my life. From the rolling Allegheny Plateau to the hills of north-central West Virginia, I've been wrapped in mountain mists and lulled by the sounds of flowing streams and deep-woods birds such as vireos and thrushes. But in 1997 I came down to the flatlands, to Greensboro, and it has been a wonderful transition but not without some pangs for a former life. Nancy Simpson's book of new and selected poems, out last year from Carolina Wren Press, takes me back. In 108 pages, it covers a lifetime as woman and poet, from 1977 to 2009. I've begun to know something of this devoted teacher and activist, beyond the exchanged e-mail messages when she drew me into the family of the John C. Campbell Folk School. I still rem...

I thought I was to going to be a poet. First publication: sixth grade, a poem about peregrine falcons and Pavlova, of all things, neither of which I’d ever seen. By the time I was in college, however, “All the President’s Men” had turned my fancy toward journalism, along with the promise of a steady if modest paycheck. I wrote, off and on, and had some poems published and took part in a poetry group. But I also wanted to write novels – insane, surely, because by then I was homesteading a West Virginia hill farm along with covering city hall. So I began writing a science fiction novel – and short stories too, why not, and the poems were still coming, and long poems that were stories in verse. My muse, it seemed, had ADD. Then I ran into Fred Chappell, a writer of magnificent talent generously applied to fiction long and short, poetry epic and lyric. He lured me into accepting the writing as the words came, and eventually out of West Virginia and into Carolina. By that...

We had a great gathering April 9 in Winston-Salem at A Gathering of Poets - put it on your calendar for the first weekend in April 2012! It's a third of the way through National Poetry Month, and it seems the reminders are everywhere. This morning, with the air heavy from last night's rain, is also thick with the perfume of wisteria, iris, and from a neighbor's yard, old-fashioned lilacs. These don't grow so well here in the South, not like the magnificent tree that swelled at the back corner of my grandparents' house in Little Valley, but the perfume is the same. I never could decide the difference between Persian lilacs and French lilacs, but I know the ones I have in mind, a magnificent light purple fading toward blue, for me the color and scent of death, seductive and sad. These were heavy blooms, toppling the branches on wet days. We broke them from the trees and massed them in Mason jars for the gravesites in spring. And so in grief I hear Whitman’s “When L...