Interview; "Int w ""Potato Eyes"" Lit. Journal founders, Carolyn Page (Roy Zaruchi) & Southern Poet"

This is Cathy Emilio I am in Studio A at the hen house of W E Are you with Roy as a rookie and Carolyn page. They are the owners of nightshade press publishers of a collection of poetry fiction reviews an art called potato eyes which is published twice a year. Welcome back to the hen house to both of you. Thank you. What's what's exciting with night shade press these days. Well I think one of the most exciting things is that we're getting manuscripts in for the William in Kingman page chapbook competition so we open them up you know thinking this manuscript may be the greatest manuscript ever crossed any editor's desk. And you know as they come in we just kind of peek at them because we wait until a lot of them are in before we start the screening process. And the other exciting thing this year was that we. Got it. OK from the IRS to create the potato wise Foundation which is the goal of it is to deliver poetry to the public

purse in a broad sense and we've moved potato eyes and literary arts journal over under the umbrella of the foundation so that it would go on in case we got run over by a bus or something and. And we also have a visiting schools program for poets from a way for our first poet was able level Haman from Louisiana and I understand she's You can interview or after Wow. And she came up and visited my view this week and also picked up my own view high school and also heard it live Poets Society last night. So visiting poets from away which. They're funded partly by the foundation. So that was an exciting thing for us to do.

It's great. I suppose anyone involved in poetry is is obviously not in it for the money. Reisa the passion for sharing the word right and developing an audience a while back we were at the Jack Kerouac festival and we noticed that there was this incredible interest now it's like Born Again beatniks. They dress just like I did when I was around in the 60s and there and there are deifying Jack Kerouac which is OK. I mean we are all for freedom of expression and deify any poet you want. Where is that festival held in Lowell. His hometown. So potato wise you are you well always accepting submissions for this. Yes that we're always rejecting to think rejecting everything all year round. And so we will give the address of nightshade press a little later. Sure. Carolyn your book Troy corner poems has been very well received Tell us a little about that. When did you publish that.

Well it's kind of a sickening really sweet story. I had published most of the points and little literary magazines and I really wanted them all and some of them under one cover because I had nothing to sell when I gave readings. So at Christmas unbeknownst to me my husband had gone through all this preparation with our printer and he handed me my little book of Troy corner points and so I thought well I hope it sells a few and lo and behold it sold out. So then he gave me another gift of a reprint of the book and it still doing very well. I'm kind of surprised because all the points really are about one little tiny town of 700 80 people you know with more cows than people but I guess there's something universal about those those characters you know who are certainly painted from from real life composites of very real people warts and all. Will you share a poem or two from it with us. Sure. Love to.

One of the ones that women seem to really appreciate I see their faces acknowledge some sad. Secret that's in this point and read it for you it's called Popple. I used to think that wood was popular but they don't color popular around here. They make fun of this would call it pop will say it's good for nothing. As we split wood for winter my neighbor claims it burns too quick why bother with it pulps all it's good for. He swings his axe into dependable. I clear out pop will make way for sterner stuff. I lived with a man like Popple dangerous when stoked. Sure burning there was no give to him no reasoning when Vicious January night when rip saw winds tore the shingles off the roof. I stuffed socks into cracks stoked up the stove and he began to blaze. After fortifying himself with Scotch he slammed out into a

northwest gale and I found myself clear cut of him. That's not a point about Roy I want you to know. I. It's taken me a while to develop a kind of trust with the people of the town and so that they are beginning to share their secrets with Roy and with me and I'll just read you a short one it's based on a very true story. The man who swallowed string. I didn't do it to please no one except the grand kids who'd hang around Jordan bug eyed to see the famous trick in it'd go all white and scary. Then how did cum limp and moist but usable still. Oh old Tyler wasn't one to waste anything. Tipping up his wine bottle to catch the last of it. Saved up feathers from the altered hen house he sometimes lived in when he helped the heli's a one room shack smack on the town line

saved up straying too for the final show and when he died he had enough to go from Troy to unity and back again. Well that's great for the people of Troy interested in these poems. We read one at a Grange Hall and they seemed amazed that we would in any way celebrate or glorify their humble grain suppers like a man asked. And they it's for sale in the town office and the general store and I thought people from away would buy it mostly but I think the town people want to be sure I haven't said anything bad about them and so that's why they buy it then once they get it they say they seem to feel she she she really thinks we're something special and and there's suspicion of us because we've only been there seven years. You know it takes about twenty seven before they think of you as someone who actually lives there. They're warming up to us now.

So actually we've had some come by the house and asked to buy extra copies for their kids who have moved away. That kind of thing and really is just profiles of kind of merged characters from Troy in the past but it's funny because they don't know what to make of it when I say don't you want me to sign it. And I say well if I sign it maybe when I'm famous it'll be worth something and they you know they look at me like what are you talking about. If I commend you both for your hard work in keeping poetry alive people tell us all of the time well radio you know what use will there be for radio with the information superhighway exploding and expanding but I think that especially community radio the voice of neighbor to neighbor in all that we have even more of a role in the future it's sort of a grassroots thing and I see poetry as that. So I think as long as people have imagination left then that's kind of

the common bond between poetry and radio. That requires the listener or that or the reader to bring themselves to the experience and then to imagine beyond what's printed on the page or beyond what comes to their ears. And so poetry and radio do kind of go together that way and no one no matter how huge and all empowering the information highway is going to be. I for one always have taken a back road. There are going to be a lot of other people who are going to want to get off that highway. You know that's right and the beauty of just what you can do with words is it's still overwhelming. And I'm glad you're doing it. Speaking of bringing poetry to the people you have worked with the poet Eva level Haman and she is here from Louisiana right now. And before I talk to her I'd just like to hear a little bit about her from you because I don't expect her to tell me about her awards and all of that.

OK. The first year that we ran the WM in Kingman page chap Book Award. You know we put out notices nationwide and solicited manuscripts of 31 pages in length from all over the country and we got in well over 100 hundred twenty I think that first year and among those EVAs came out as first runner up of that competition. The winner was a fellow out in Iowa. And Ava's was the first runner up and it was such wonderful poetry that we elected to publish her because we just loved her poetry so much that these long southern narratives which. I just have always had a special place in our poetry heart I guess you could say although I don't like the use of the word right. So we published both the winner and the runner go yeah we thought that was a good president so we're going

to try to continue that tradition of publishing both. Both the winner and the runner up yet another runner up if they're you know just tremendous. Well we did that the set the second year we have upcoming Linda Harper from South Carolina won the award and then the first runner up was Jerry Terrio from Portland Maine South Portland Maine in her book corn dance will be out next month. So this. Anyway that's the way Ava came to us and. So one thing led to another and of course we published the book and it has done very well built in fear of heat is the name of it was sold out and we ran seven or eight hundred and. Eva is a poet who happens to be a poet in the schools in Louisiana and likes to do public appearances and things so because we have the potato eyes foundation we said well you know how would you feel about doing a Northeastern tour. She said before it gets too cold so we said OK. And so

she came up for this week in October which is about the best week of the year to visit Maine I think. There's nothing to bite you and the weather is just about right. And so she has been to like poets. She's even bought green cotton long underwear because it's still a little too cold for her here. Very even level Haman. Welcome to the hen house Welcome to Maine. Thank you. You're from Louisiana. That's right. Baton Rouge. How did you become a poet. How did I become a poet. I grew up in church a lot and in church I was surrounded by a lot of very wonderful language but I didn't necessarily like the ideas that were coming down with it. But I had to sit still in a pew and act like I was listening and so I think one of the things I did was play with the words and play word games in my head to keep sitting still.

And your poems in your latest book built in fear of heat a lot of them reflect back on those memories of that time and this was published by night shade press in Maine. Tell us about built in fear of heat. These points came to me. In in one batch I think the story of how these points came amazes me as much as it sounds unbelievable to anybody else. One afternoon I was working and all of a sudden this poem came to me and it's the one that is named drive slowly now. His name draws slowly away from heat and went through numerous drafts and I remember what it's called but this one afternoon here came this boy I was so thrilled with this boy as it was a whole new dimension of poem writing. It was an 85. And that night my mother called me and said my father had died and it was and he

wasn't sick. We were expecting him to die and he died so I always felt like that point was my. Premonition. And then every week and a half or two weeks for the next several months one of these poems would come to me in a kind of a pulse and this and it's it's most of the poems in this sit although there are a couple of additions since then and then I worked on of course for a long time after that but the the genesis of all those poems came you know very real steady be it through the first four or five months after his death and I kind of feel like that was MY GIFT FROM THE OTHER SIDE to get me through that very difficult period. If I Could we get you to read one of the poems from built in fear of heat. I'd like to read the point Fance which is the last poem in the collection and. It's a very visual very visual poem it was working at the time. Oh on poems that

were taken from flatwork art. And. When all the memories started coming down after a father's death and I think that this poem kind of comes from that. It's called finance. You say you're in kindergarten and your teacher tells you draw offense. The black crayons thick as another thumb. You have to bear down with your whole arm. You mash Crayola marks against the paper wanted to time and the construction paper begins to move under your hands scrolling off a giant roll she didn't tell you about. Say you're determined to do it right and you don't get bored. And the paper's no problem since it just keeps coming and you go on for a couple of years. Picket after picket lines getting straighter while your fingers grow a little thin and curl around the

Crayola which is now a yellow pencil and you're scratching out an earnest outline of skinny rectangles like teeth. And you've invented the second dimension although you don't know to call it that. And you keep on doing the teeth for a while and the faithful slow moving paper gets blue lines on it like three whole notebook sheets except it's this assembly line belt that just keeps rolling and rolling and the teeth get straighter now more like piano keys and say you're taller and have to stoop over the paper a little which is good drawing paper. No blue lines and you feel a callous bumping up on your third finger and your chest getting bumpy too and you look out the classroom window fans and your fine muscles knit in another dimension. The sides of your boards crease and fall back and you sketch them that way for some time and even the little point on the top gets aside and you look up again and now a cross piece

drags its way along peeking between slats. Then the teacher nods and says you can go to algebra. But say if you kept on if the teacher forgot you were in there all by yourself with the moving paper and her instructions to get it right and say you kept on until you gazed at the fence outside every time before you looked down to sketch and once you saw one of the slats out there in full sun open like a hole melting in a filmstrip and a dazzling light sizzles out of it and you looked back down quick. But now the slats you were drawing start to gape into holes in the sliding paper holes that sear open under your hands and a light brighter than the classroom fluorescent. You've been under so long briar in the glare out the window on the white picket fence. Brighter than anything. Say those holes burned open in the paper you're so used to and that light underneath

comes through the fence. By Ava level Haman. Great poem and thank you. There's a rhythm in your reading of it as well. It's a mesmerizing kind of thing. Do you have feelings about reading in. Is it important or does it complete the poem for you too to recite it. It would very important to me yes and when I'm writing the point I can hear them in the voice that I would read the man. And often when I'm working on a point the very best thing I can do is read it to an audience. After that I always know what I want to do where it wants to go how you might read it differently or what about how I might write you know how I might change the when I'm editing it how we did it. I

learned that reading it to other people. What about in the schools how do you how do children respond to your poetry. Well I don't I obviously don't read all the poems that I write to them but but some of them they like very well this particular point they relate to it doesn't have it there's no idea in there that it's sophisticated and there's there no there's no vocabulary in there that even the fourth grader wouldn't know and they a number of my poems. I think one of the reasons that I always have forms that I can read with children is that a number of my points start with a kind of a physical. Physical motion or body twitch of some kind like in that one a little kid trying to hold a crayon. You hold it with your hand turn backwards first and then you learn. There they come out of something kinesthetic and children are still trying to figure out how to sit still in the chair just like I am and so we get along fine.

And do you also when they go in the school things encourage the children to write poetry are you trying to impart a love of poet I am. I am mainly teaching poetry writing yes. I teach poetry writing rather than the history of poetry I think maybe their teacher would be better at that than I am. And I try to. I think that I teach a lot of very poor and. I teach all the children in the school system in Baton Rouge which is a very large city with a with a sort of desperate inner city and there are many poets in that city over. In that part of the city just about everybody is a poet. And I know and children that are young and have been have had very difficult lives they are they have they need the tools so badly to save themselves from childhood. You know I think child it's a pretty dangerous place and we have to give

those kids the tools to express their experience. And so we kind of see eye to eye on that. Yeah and children too. My poems are very sound sound oriented rather than idea oriented. And kids can still remember that words are something that you hear rather than something that you read off a page. I heard a program on the radio last night about rap music and it was about children or inner city children becoming more interested in words and poetry because of rap music. I thought that was interesting. Could we have you read another of your poems. Sure this point is named heat and. It has in it a Krrish which is a little difficult to understand when you hear it but a question of course is nativities seen like you put out for Christmas. So this poem is named heat edges waivered ran

together but are Crayolas tar. Our mothers make up chocolate. The ice blocks in sawdust. My grandmother who knew more than one way to skin a cat made me a chubby baby chick out of yellow modeling clay that lay down in a single July afternoon and became an egg. My grip goes soft. I know the heat hiding in the latitudes is waiting to reduce us all. Like the way crash figures high on Route 1 Advent season to find the baby Jesus Halo and all melted into the headless camel of an unlucky wise man himself. Dark and shapeless in the manger with one of Mary's blue white arms. Heat evil What did it mean to you to win the WM in

Kingman page chapbook award. Well it was great. And here's the way it happened. Roy is a rookie who didn't remember I'd say anything to call me up on the phone and said hey we would like to publish your book. My name is Roy as a rookie and our book is nightshade press and our press is nightshade press and we're going to we would like to blah blah blah and this will be out in so-and-so and so-and-so and I said that's great but you know we talked about two minutes I said that's great you know and I got so excited when you said that that I haven't heard a single thing we've said for two minutes. I mean he said the sweetest thing he said How far do you need to go back. And I said oh all the way to the beginning. Yeah it was terrific and went to that year and a half ago about a year and a half ago I had two books that that

domino did almost exactly the same time one in California and this one in Maine and then they but they both went through the production process in the editing process and arriving on the scene almost like twins and in the other it was staving off rapture. Great title. Thank you. So do you. You say you feel you had forgotten that you sent this out to you. Just send. No I didn't I didn't forget but I sent it out I had probably remembered nightshade press and didn't remember Roy's Ruthie's funny name. And and so now you put you. You come out with two books of poetry in 94 and I imagine you're still writing all the time hoping to come out with more. Yeah I have one coming out in fact in about two months named why the groundhog fears her shadow it will be published by March St. press. Creed.

And do you regularly do poetry readings. Yes I read a great deal I like to read. And in the last three or four years I've traveled a good bit and read most all parts of the country. Well I'll ask you to read one more for our listeners please. OK. I'd like to read the first one in built in fear of heat. This one is called You can see it in the architecture. You can see it in the architecture. Gather round Yankees come out from inside those masonry double walls and smallish windows furnace puffin away and iron lung just under the carpet floor. Southern houses are built in fear of heat. Our hangouts where Eilat instead of sleeping caps and shawls and they tend to be young girls dead of the yellow fever after birth of a baby that had to be strangled. Built of wood inside and out.

High Sea Islands a pine floor set on soft brick Piers footed in the flat boggy muck overflows raised above Swamp fire mosquito is roomy closets stuffed with whatever it is we find to wrap bones in wrapped with bay laurel sprigs for the mildew you describe in a tinder box. You may have noticed with bead board Wayne Scott or floral wallpapers and layer on layer of paint and wax. They say you always become what you most fear. With an attic always an attic for the updraft. Don't you know all Ross Cypress smale there where the heat collects builds heat the downstairs rooms were designed to hide the funnel up here up here with the cobweb trunks that won't lock anymore and the bundles of dry rot

doll clothes. A dark trying goal vault gluttonous for thermal increase. Hungry for a hundred oppressive summer afternoons till the hot rid I of memory flicks open at last. Underneath it's all the gauze bandages and the whole structure is consumed.