Frances Badgett – Wishbone Stick
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Lexington, Virginia steeped in summer afternoon storytelling that winds its way late into the night. I walk 74 percent slower than most people I know here in Washington State. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who orders grits at the diner here in town. I have that way we have that makes us really tiresome at the grocery store in places like Seattle and New York. I'm descended from Felix Grundy. I'll let you Google him.
*ValNote: I google'd him.
April Writer Spotlight – Robert Klein Engler and a bit more…
This month’s poetry rises above the pocosin and flies over our heads toward the astral plain. Having North Carolina’s poet laureate, Joseph Bathanti, join us to create an issue unparalleled in lyrical superiority seemed to compliment our seventeen year online...
Rachel Kapitan — the notion …
I moved to Virginia at age seven and was baptized by vernacular when on my first day at the new school my teacher told me to do something "right quick." The whole world sounded different. Decades later, I can make fried green tomatoes without a recipe, and (not so) secretly enjoy going to the Bass Pro Shop.
In Loving Memory
* * The 2013 April (Poetry Month) Issue of the Dead Mule is dedicated to the memory of Elsie R. Jones May 13, 1921 – March 12, 2013 Beloved Mother of Poetry Editor Helen Losse. * Elsie Rosa Jones, born...
Joseph Bathanti – NC Poet Laureate
Mr. Bathanti is well known to many of us in NC. Bathanti is currently a professor of creative writing at Appalachian State University where he is also Director of Writing in the Field. He is the Writer-in-Residence for the Watauga Global Community.
He was installed as the seventh North Carolina Poet Laureate on September 20, 2012, at a ceremony in Raleigh, North Carolina. During his two-year term, he will be an "Ambassador of N.C. Literature" and will remain free to create his own long-term projects. The position requires the laureate to participate in various literary activities across the state, working with "with schools, community groups, and the press." We see the two extraordinary poems here in the Dead Mule as an extension of his poetic mandate.
Mr. Bathanti has received many honors including:
The Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award (1995)
Oscar Arnold Young Award – The North Carolina Poetry Council (1997)
Carolina Novel Award – Banks Channel Books (2001)
Sherwood Anderson Award (2002)
Linda Flowers Literary Award – NC Humanities Council (2002)
Novello Literary Award (2006)
The Spokane Prize – Eastern Washington University
North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012–2014)
Ragan-Rubin Award – North Carolina English Teachers Association (2012)
*Wikipedia entry re:Joseph Bathanti. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, check his Wikipedia page for more details and a list of his publications and access links.
Statement from the Editors:
Every year, in April, the Dead Mule publishes the poet laureate of a Southern state as the centerpiece of its Poetry Issue. Helen Losse established this tradition early in her career as Poetry Editor here a the Mule. In past years, we have featured such esteemed poets as: Kathryn Stripling Byer, Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Marjory Wentworth, Claudia Emerson, Sue Brannon Walker, and Cathy Smith Bowers.
This year we are fortunate to have two unique and wonderful poems from Joseph Bathanti, the Poet Laureate of North Carolina 2012-2014. He was appointed by Gov. Bev Purdue.
This April poetic tradition is a joy to create each year and we hope everyone enjoys reading all the incredible writing.
Later in the middle of the month -- don't forget -- Fiction! Essays! And now, read on -- on down the page -- there are 27 more poets here.
Janet Joyner : Six Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Number One: if you’re the one asking “Honey, who are your people?” let’s just say mine have been here long enough to understand the question; Number Two: there’s a reason my middle name is Lee; Number Three: I grew up in the Carolina low country where even the sweat sweats. That good enough?
**
Jim “Jazzbo” Chandler: Five Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I heared tell of some moron passin' around the word that Jazzbo Chandler might not be pure bred Southern...ignernt sumbitch claimed he was born north of the Tennessee--Kentucky line and jest claimed to be a man of the True South.
Boy, 'at got my damn blood boilin'! I was hotter than Granny was when she caught Grandpa out in the barn commiseratin' with some of the livestock in a manner that was again the law, I reckon. Grandpa claimed both snaps on his Dee-Cee bibs failed at the same time and he was astandin' on the five-gallon bucket 'cause he didn't wanna get cow manure all over his new clod stompers.
I don't reckon Granny believe 'at too much, 'cause she went up aside his head with a single-tree and brained him. He got outta the hospital a couple days ago after about six month, but I reckon they's somethin' still wrong with him . . . he said he's some German scientist named Brownsher Bosch and he owned the Ford Company. Hell, Grandpa ain't got a bucket to piss in nor a winder to throw it out of, not since his boy, Uncle Claude, went to sleep with his crack pipe and burnt down the house.
As the poetry editor of this here profane and vulgar magerzine tole me, us Rank Stranger stick together. Hell yeah we do; I'm buyin' me one of them damn plastic squeeze bottle syrup thangs, hell with them Karo bottles! They always mess up on me and I look like a sight with them pieces of biscuit stuff all over my overalls.
I'm a good Southern boy, though. I always let them pore kids what ain't got no food lick off the stickins. They shore like me.
**
Ronald Moran: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I love the South. Although I was not born in the South, I have lived my last 53 years in Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. My late and beloved wife, Jane, of 50 years is, along with her parents, buried in South Carolina; my parents are buried in North Carolina; and my children, born in Louisiana, live in the South, as do all of my grandchildren. Near the end
of my teaching career at Clemson University, one of my classes presented me with a framed certificate with the following inscription:
This Certificate
Allows as How
Ronald W. Moran
By Virtue of his Literary
Achievement
Is Now and Evermore Shall Be
A
Son of the South
That means a lot to me.
**
Wendy Taylor Carlisle: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was raised in Florida in the days when I could ride my horse across New River Bridge and tie her to a parking meter while I shopped in the 5 & 10. (yes. a nickle and a dime) Arkansas took hold of me in 1973; hasn't let go yet. I was an accidental Texan for a while. In the land of Budweiser and boviculture, I kept trying to get back to the mountains. When I went to school in Vermont, one of my buddies and I ordered a sack of grits shipped in so the cooks could make grits for everybody--not everybody ate them. Right now, I live in the Arkansas Ozarks and damned glad of it.
**
Joe Mills: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Although I wasn’t born in the South, I have lived here long enough to acknowledge strangers I pass rather than walking by silent and stone-faced. I hadn’t realized that I was doing this until a trip up North a few years ago when I received several startled reactions from people whose expressions said, “I don’t know you. Why are you talking to me?”
**
Stan Absher: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in North Carolina and, except for two years in France and a few years in Utah, I’ve lived in Virginia or North Carolina my whole life. I don’t much like grits, unless they’re baked and served with shrimp. My immediate family briefly owned a mule, primarily (I think) so my father could brag about it, but my uncle stubbornly continued to use one to cultivate his garden when everyone else had moved on to gas-powered tillers.
**
Alina Coryell: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I came to Alabama from communist Romania with a banjo on my knee at the stunning age of three. While my friends were learning how to slobber out the correct “cain’t”, I wore red jeans to Catholic school and learned from the nuns that communism was thick as blood and showed up in pants. I wrote speeches for my next door neighbor to deliver to the local chapter of the D.A.R.— long, windbagged proclamations of hot and heavy patriotic ardor, stories of generals and saints who hated all the right people for all the godly reasons.
These days, I practice the fine southern art of sauntering around aimlessly with my three unschooled children hoping to attract the eye of that handsome city slicker I married. As a stay-at-home feminist, I refuse to keep more than one room of the house tidy at a time and maintain a strict “no cleaning on weekdays” policy. This explains why the family often camps out in the backyard at night.
Being a dilettante does not receive the respect it deserves in my hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. That’s why I plans to join the Green Party this year.
When I’m not admiring the sublime curvature of my rather buxom nose, I like to force my children to dress as early American settlers and scream “slow down” at old men in cars inching through the neighborhood.
**
Norbert Krapf: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and grew up on an island of German Catholics in southern Indiana surrounded by folks from Appalachia. Driving to the east and crossing the Ohio River, we came into Louisville, where I still have many maternal cousins. Going on forty-three years ago, I married a Cajun from Lafayette, Louisiana, whose mother’s maiden name was LeBlanc, from the LeBlanc Settlement. During the thirty-four years we lived on Long Island, on the cusp of New York City, where we raised our adopted daughter and son from Bogotá, Colombia, we had crawfish (never “crayfish”) flown in annually on dry ice from Cajunland. Indiana was a second and Louisiana a third home to our children. When my wife and I retired from teaching and moved back to Indiana in 2004, I started collaborating with jazz and blues musicians. I have been to see Minnesota minstrel Bob Dylan perform more times than I will here admit. I fell deep in love with the blues in the late 60s and have been a devotee ever since, culminating in several trips to Memphis and the Mississippi Blues Trail. It’s all been one great gumbo.
**
Poetry
Essays
