Getting to know the new poet laureate, Cathy Smith Bowers
by Rob Neufeld

On January 28, Cathy Smith Bowers of Tryon became North Carolina’s sixth poet laureate, succeeding Kathryn Stripling Byer, who had served two terms. Smith Bowers comes to the post having lived a life immersed in mystery, language, and destiny.

“My father,” Smith Bowers said in a recent interview with the Citizen-Times, “was concerned that we (his children) would progress beyond what he had been, a millworker. He would line us up, all six of us—it was a ritual that he would often do. He would go down the line, telling us what each of us was going to be. I was the teacher…It was one of the earliest messages I ever got, and in my mind, it wasn’t a suggestion. It was a fact.”

Growing up in Lancaster, South Carolina, Smith Bowers witnessed her family spinning away from its center. In her poem, “Rosie, Old Rain,” published in her first volume, “The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas,” she writes about her younger sister’s response to the chaos.

“Suddenly, out of the chronic cyclone/ of our parents’ arguing/ she would spin, tiny dervish/ from their center, tapping/ and whirling across the linoleum…small shaman/ dancing the devils out.”

Sounding out mystery

Smith Bowers’ first book was published after thirteen years of gestation. She had already become a teacher of writing at Queens College in Charlotte; and had explored ways of turning her churning impressions of what makes people and the world tick into visions. The first poem in her first book is titled “Paleolithic,” and imagines the hunters of Lascaux assembling bison on cave walls.

“I always begin” Smith Bowers said about her writing process, “with an abiding image. I sit with hat image and I turn it and turn it and look at it from every angle, and I write into the mystery of that image…They (the images) are asking something of me. They’re asking me to look beyond the surface to the bigger levels of meaning and metaphor.”

Metaphor is the magical bridge between levels of meaning; and sound, the prayer that gets us there.

“Bane of slugs,” Smith Bowers begins her poem, “Salt”—and “moniker for sailors”; and we think we’re getting a list of salt associations. Then we find ourselves entering the deathbed room of the poet’s grandfather as her grandmother uses salt to prepare sauerkraut, beets, and other foods, while keeping the children quiet with Bible horror stories—including about Lot’s wife—and her grandfather grumbles about the migrant worker “not worth his salt,” and about the blandness of his last meals.

Language affects bodies

“Salt” is not a rhyming poem; but the repetition of the word in different contexts is as pleasing as rhyme. For Smith Bowers, properly sounded and placed words can have miraculous effects. “Language affects out physical bodies,” she said. “Language affects our brains. Putting forth the effort to phrase something in the best way it can be phrased is putting positive energy into the world.”

Smith Bowers’ third book, “A Book of Minutes,” followed the crushing death of her younger brother, whom she says “glittered when he walked.” She adopted a poetic form—called “a minute,” “an elegant weaving of Elizabethan sonnet and early-Eastern haiku”—and it saved her, providing “a safe container for the raw, emotional subject matter…begging to be articulated.”

In her new volume, “The Candle I Hold Up to See You,” she looks even more intently at the agency of language. The first section, “Eight Names for God,” draws on sacred precedents. In the poem headed by the Hebrew letters, ayin-lamed-med, spelling, “Elam,” Smith Bowers reflects on her mother, a multi-tasking housewife.

“If the brain is merely/ a radio, receptor/ of the twin broadcasts/ of Light and Dark, then,” she writes, “my mother kept hers tuned/ both day and night/ to the non-stop static airwaves/ of station HELL.” “Had she only known this name” (Elam), the poet muses, “evoked for ridding heart and mind/ of bleak imaginings, she might/ have been more like me.”

Fulfilling her mother’s heartache

Smith Bowers fulfills her mother’s love affair with language. “My mother loved singing old English ballads,” Smith Bowers reflected in the interview. “She seemed to know all the verses to Barbara Allen—I think there were ninety-two,” and, at times, gathered all her children on her bed to calm them down with the song.”

“The books that we brought home from school,” Smith Bowers noted, “she would read. She would find poems in them and read them to us…My mother, who had a fourth grade education, ended up reading Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, Melville.”

In her common speech, the poet’s mother “rarely ever said anything in a straightforward way.” “You were the first poet, Mama,” Smith Bowers declares in her poem, “My Mother’s Lexicon,” published in “A Book of Minutes.” “Dad didn’t patronize/ old man Causey’s/ bar, he stayed laid/ up down there. Paid/ not with cash but rags from his younguns’/ backs.”

Laureate’s line-up

Smith Bowers feels that everyone can be a poet. Schools should have children reciting poems in class, as they once did. On a date, a lad or lass might throw out a special line of poetic language for effect. People might keep commonplace books, anthologizing their favorite passages, and sharing them.

She teaches in the Queens College's M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program, in UNC Asheville's Great Smokies Writing Program, and at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. She has students analyzing their names, learning about the physiology of sounds, and discovering the “abiding images” that contain the most energy for them.

She wants to make her home place, Tryon, “the village that reads poems”; and to display poems in barbershops and grocery stores. She wants people to find their better selves through their voices, experience joy in readings, and—ironically, considering her schedule—slow down their appreciation of life.

She jokes about it her poem, Slow,” published in her second volume, “Traveling in Time of Danger,” noteworthy for its story poems. “I like the joke about the snail/ who mugged the turtle/ who when asked by the policeman/ to recount the sequence of events/ couldn’t because it all happened so fast.”

EVENT AND MORE

Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center and Captain’s Bookshelf hold a reception for Cathy Smith Bowers at the museum, 56 Broadway, Asheville, 7 p.m., Fri., April 30. Call 350-8484.
Cathy Smith Bowers’ four books—The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas (1992); Traveling in Time of Danger (1999); A Book of Minutes (2004); and The Candle I hold Up To See You (2009)—are all published by Iris Press, an Oak Ridge, Tennessee company that also publishes the poetry of Ron Rash and Keith Flynn.
To learn more about Smith Bowers as poet laureate, visit the N.C. Arts Council website.