The first Piedmont Laureate of North Carolina was officially named today — Saturday, November 15 — at the N.C. Writers’ Network’s annual Fall Conference. Poet Jaki Shelton Green will serve a one-year term, designed to “to promote awareness and heighten appreciation for excellence in the literary arts throughout the Piedmont region” of North Carolina. Green, author of several collections of poetry, including most recently 2005’s Breath of the Song: New and Selected Poems (published by Carolina Wren Press), has already earned two of the state’s highest honors in literature: the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2003, in recognition of “the countless lives she touches by word and deed,” and the Sam Ragan Award in 2007 for “outstanding contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina.”
In celebration of this honor and her new position, here is a brief taste of her work: the poem “things break down” from her 1996 collection Conjure Blues. The poem was reprinted in the extraordinary anthology Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry, edited by Sally Buckner, who also served on the committee which selected Green for the laureate position.
things break down
things break down in different ways
like love
it’s been ten years since
i’ve been thin
things break down in different ways
like the absence of his smile
things break down in different ways
like the meadows of the skin
apples spoil
meat rots
aspirin takes care of toothache but
things break down in different ways
like the last time he praised my art
stood in my mirror
things break down in different ways
like sunday morning blues
getting sung out at the altar
i said things break down
in different ways
like my clock stopping
one morning at 3 a.m.
he crashed his car into the river
things break down
his toothbrush is still
beside the mirror
Add to Facebook: 