NATIONAL POETRY MONTH
If everyone embraced poetry, the world would be a much better place.
Assistant Professor of the Practice in Writing Andrew Rippeon, a once reluctant seventh-grade poetry student who now teaches, writes and loves poetry, holds that truth.
He’s in good company: from students to faculty to alumni and staff, Davidson harbors a community of poets and poetry lovers.
Some are nationally recognized award-winners; others are just starting. Throughout April, which is dedicated as National Poetry Month, we’ll share some of our poets’ verses.
Lucky
That’s the word I chose
for a prompt I gave the class
Do what Danez Smith does with bare
What Aisha Anderson does with laughing
How many ways can you use a word?
Make of the associations something
Mine the flesh of sounds
Find a body in the history, a world
that burns in the word
the way sea becomes the Aegean
raft-filled, dinghies spilling
children, the way one of its survivors
in a basement room in Athens
turned a stuffed garbage bag
into a ball he and Abude tossed
back and forth across two chairs missing their backs
They started to laugh, uncontrollably
as that ball lost its shape, falling apart
as the paper escaped
and they continued throwing shreds of it
when I said “Hey…”
Hey, what was I thinking?
They were being asked to clean up
Told to go out into the playground
where pot-a-potties were leaking
“Lucky,” I should have said, hey these kids
laughing in a basement room wet from the rain blowing through
a broken window, are showing me
some crazy glee, why would anyone stop
these paper shreds from spilling out of a garbage bag
Bashad and Abude hysterical
determined to keep the ball
in the air, newspaper headlines, the world
balled up in that black plastic
coming apart, it was all the fun
they could have, on the edge of two backless chairs
all the fun they could not stop having
Adrianne Calfo-Kalfopoulou is the 2020-2021 McGee Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College.
Poets she’s currently reading: Adam Zagajewski, Valzhyna Mort, Alan Michael Parker
Knot Undone
to the king which is not
according to the law about
animals and birds—forms,
flowing toward beloved plants toward
the hyssop that grows out of walls
when all the world is loved that
consumes it—and if I perish
in quarters where a little
breath may kindle a flame in
one’s hand I perish
•
then flowers upon the face a cold
and silver guilt out of ardent
thirst what day cries a cough from
the heart of the hurt man issues
a machine to pieces—what day
what day was it a year
ago—the angel says their flower was
a quiet breath of violence, angel
or agent of stone, then smoke, these
ashes, and stone again…
Andrew Rippeon is Assistant Professor of the Practice, Writing. He also founded and directs the Davidson College Letterpress Lab.
A favorite poet: Douglas Kearney
the emptiness left after a boom or a cry
1
once, in high school, I held a white boy in a headlock for standing too tall and blonde. his face turned purple, foamin at the mouth, before let go.
if I credit such violence to my home, I’d reduce my father to his mistakes, my mother to her resilience.
I’d ignore the scriptures that describe absence as not only natural and all-consuming, but what must precede creation.
once, I wrote I come from a lineage of broken homes and survival tactics. I remember the poem which declared never again call a home broken!
a home never really breaks.
sort of...stretches thin...across the cities and courtrooms.
the survival tactics remain.
I see a two parent home and know mine’s different but not emptier.
the absence has form! (remember that.)
Do you deny a breeze bending the trees to the topsoil?
Do you deny breath [ ] sputtering out a strangled throat?
2
(reading Afropessimism by Wilderson III)
in which he affirms Black folk be inhuman in the eyes of the world.
The realization broke him, like sugar & water.
will we all arrive at this conclusion? one day,
we marched. screaming about how Black Lives Matter!
from the fishbowl to the flagpole to Main Street, bordered by police, who don’t mind a bit of demonstration
stay! on the sidewalk. don’t! spill out on the paved road. who! knew Keith Lamont Scott anyway?
I thought
I could
replace his name easily.
We all died
too soon
and too loud
enough
to break the small down numbness.
Burn it down! my peers yell.
I try [ ] writing about 400 years of ragerubbleresistance
cough up a few memories of home.
how down the street I see the same big bellied mansions consuming the Black block and no one says a word except those disappearing
what do they leave?
a vacant lot, families spread thin, a sound
like the emptiness left after a boom or a cry.
3
on the left
I see folks convinced I’m nothing more than the recipient of racism
stitched together the way my great grams turned old clothes to quilts
& we’d wear them until the warmth withers
& after, wrap the well so the water don’t freeze in the Winter.
on the wright
a reminder I have been cared and nurtured
for generations.
Therefore, I have a debt to pay.
We all have a debt to pay
& the space between two hands matters, and has form. (remember that!)
I have inherited a peculiar humanity.
On my joyous days, I can pray back a couple ancestors, walk the gravel road with chin held high, don’t mind a dysfunctional home
brothers got my back
mama held it down
but you - you caught on me on a day of sorrow and rage
when I get tired
of being called poor fatherless boy brilliant despite circumstance our token - college bound black shines in the spotlight
and you - you blocking my way standing in the doorframe
and I - I want nothing more than to feel free.
so I grab that head full of sun-stained hair
and hooooooold
with a shivering grip.
Maurice J. Norman '20 currently works in the E.H. Little Library at Davidson College as the Digital Projects Fellow developing the initiative, Stories (Yet) to be Told: Race, Racism and Accountability on Campus.
A favorite poet: Hanif Abdurraqib
Spring, Again
Winter sounds
rushing
in the yard
water gushes
from the gutters
glorious
Robin’s song
around the bend
rambling
through wet leaves
Hepaticas
born new, again
all that living
zigzagging
under a rock.
Lisa A. Forrest is the Leland M. Park Director of the E.H. Little Library at Davidson College.
Favorite poets: Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley
Psalm
after Yehuda Amichai
after Yehuda Amichai
If there are grave stones, may there be
shy stones, kind stones, mad stones,
scared stones, thoughtful stones,
and may we have a choice;
and if there are hummingbirds, may there be
humming walks and humming naps,
humming minutes between
the minutes that hum in anger,
a humming table and chair by the fire,
and a warm and humming towel to wrap us in.
If there are thunder clouds, may there be
whisper clouds and echo clouds,
clouds the rustling of linens,
giggling clouds scampering,
and clouds to call a child home;
if there are heavy sighs, may there be
sighs that float or sink or rise,
and sighs that drift away,
and sighs to take from us our sighs;
and may the weeping willow,
the weeping redbud,
and the weeping cherry
weave of their weeping an evening gown;
and when we come to the end of days,
may we come to a beginning;
and if there is a time keeper,
may there be a time giver,
and if there is a guard house,
may the house be safe unguarded,
and if there is an ocean view, may we see
what the ocean sees,
the little boats of our bodies
nudged into the tide.
Alan Michael Parker is Davidson College's Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English. Psalm, featured in The Age of Discovery (Tupelo Press, 2020), is the winner of the 2019 Randall Jarrell Prize.
A favorite poet: Adam Zagajewski
What the Forest Said
I am not eloquent;
the verses leak from me like sap
brown and tainted, ebbing from my skin,
and the women in pine, they notice.
Scoff at my abasement, as if the feeling
had no receiver and the sinner no name.
Beneath coarse exterior is no striated softness
nor ring of wisdom, like you read about.
My insides are a circus of useless libations
insects feast upon, their bodies, bloated
of bark and tangled branches till skeletons
fill the hollow.
My chest doesn’t lurch the way yours does,
when I breathe there is no acknowledgment.
Below, mass tangled. Below, my roots unaware
of jubilation and the wind;
they sleep so peacefully, without knowledge
never hearing the symphonies of lilacs
the unrequited fervor of humans
in disguise. Yet, always they are protected
from the gnashing rain and the hunger
for new creation.
Lillian Rothman '21—or Lilly as her friends call her—is graduating from Davidson College with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy, and will be continuing her education as an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Favorite Poet: Emily Dickinson
Abracadabra
My mother holds the wriggling mouse
in her gloved hand
thumb poised above its vertebrae
My father in his white coat behind her
whispers the right places to break
She shakes her head—No, no
Mercy is the small name
we give an animal not ourselves
I knew she had it in her, my mother
holding me all those years ago
in the chair as my father cut my hair—
So you don’t look like a girl
Against the back of my skull
he made a fist & pulled
Like a magician & his assistant
they did the act together—Transformation
Dismemberment & Shove Her in a Hat!
The girl vanished under the black scrim
& a boy was lifted by the neck
That cowlick—
it was the only thing wild about me
In my twenties I grew my hair out
& slathered perm salt to break
the disulfide bonds
I stroked my curls, each strand
a helix hissing secrets
I thought if I looked foreign enough
no one could claim me
not even shame
which, as all things
must grow from the root
Yuxi Lin '13 is a Chinese American writer. She received her MFA from New York University. Read more of her work.
A favorite poet: Louise Glück
HEDGEROW
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. — Andrew Wyeth
The walk ended at the hedgerow,
the tangle of bodark-heartwood and thorn
down-leaning where the pasture slopes.
The house out of sight, up and beyond,
inaccessible.
There we stood. You spoke of the scumbled sky,
how it reminded you of Wyeth’s dry-brush,
scrubbing pigment into texture, muting
tones and moods—the loneliness
of winter.
I noticed the sparrow scrape and pictured
white-crowns raking snow for what
squirmed underneath. My boot-heel
kicked back—once, twice—gouging
the skeleton of the landscape
as if to leave a mark, convinced here
we could go no farther.
Karl Plank is J.W. Cannon Professor of Religion at Davidson College. HEDGEROW was published in Zone 3 31 (2016): 37.
Poet he’s currently reading: Robert Hass
EMISSARY
After filling a heel of bread with stale anger
And tossing it off the ledge into rosemary, the rosemary
appeared on a plate of hot crust the next day
and the night moon over my shoulder
became a boiled egg shining dully
with salt from my fingers from the morning swim
and the fish I pulled spines from
later swam in the boat lights eating smaller fish eating smaller
men I’ve tried to love
songs, fears, conversations
exchanged in silence
and the money I’ve lost, guests hosted
glasses I’ve broken, refilled
bruises palmed as mulberries of varying bitterness
the flush of shame for existing at all painted
back on, the blush of mischief
from a crushed cactus flower;
judgements remanded, hopes dismissed
never in measure, rarely in sequence
without any sense of propriety and not for long
though possibly for long enough, and only in this sense
they must come back in reverse
without themselves returning
as when I bite my cheek to suck the blood to speak
and the dead carry on as the dead though dead
or when I blessed you or when you touched me or
the stars visit us again in sleep
as if for the last time though not
for the last time in the end
quick—take this—
I am crossing under a bridge
becoming arches of a sanctuary that isn’t mine
there’s a trio playing music like a spell
and I don’t know how to cross the sound
to reach you and say, even if it isn’t true yet
we are not lost, we are
on our way.
Andrea Applebee '06 is an American poet, essayist and editor living in Athens, Greece. Her first book of poetry, Aletheia, was published in 2017 by Black Square Editions, and her autobiographical Mercy Athena was published by Sylph Press in 2020. Anemones, a chapbook of poems with art by Paolo Colombo is forthcoming from Magra Press this summer. You can read her essays in the Editor's Features of Tupelo Quarterly, and read and listen to her ongoing work monthly on Patreon.
When people say, “we have made it through worse before”
all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who
did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to
convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe
does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,
do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies
that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.
Clint Smith '10 is a writer and teacher. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. His first full-length collection of poetry, Counting Descent, was published in 2016. It won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His debut nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed, is forthcoming from Little, Brown.
A favorite poet: Elizabeth Alexander