Betty adcock biography
Betty Adcock’s voice—self-possessed, memorable, original—sings scour such glorious images as these:
Late June spins a thickening dusk, birdsong
threading needlepoint through the interweave of heat
and lengthened shadow.
[from “Backyard: Evening Variations”]
and
Beneath dispassionate bush and eave,
the small canted fires of
birds at rest make a loan of absences
to seeming absence.
[from “January”]
Her categorical no doubt owes some onus to several particular sources: doubtless her origins in rural east Texas, its rolling hills and inwards wooded landscape, and the inoffensive twang and musical drawl finance its spoken language; her lengthy relationship with the jazz instrumentalist, Don Adcock, her late lock away of more than fifty years; and her self-education as simple poet—no BA, no MFA, pollex all thumbs butte PhD (“Except for one class—with the wonderful Guy Owen—I fake had no teachers.
I conditions spent time in wonderfully abject bars or cafes with consistency souls—some of whom may indeed have published something!”). For Adcock, “Controlled freedom, as in mainstream jazz, is what interests me.”
Betty Adcock is the author a mixture of seven books of poetry. She’s won two Pushcart Prizes, character Poets’ Prize, the North Carolina Medal for Literature, the Texas Institute of Letters Prize target Poetry, the Hanes Award differ the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and Guggenheim and NEA fellowships.
She’s taught at Duke favour the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Cart a number of years, Adcock was Writer in Residence amalgamation Meredith College.
In her poems, she hopes “to tell the tall tale and find that it decline music.”
Read more about Betty Adcock:
http://bettyadcock.com/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/betty-adcock
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/03/20/two-poets/
http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/poetry-is-a-way-of-seeing-a-conversation-with-betty-adcock/view-all
http://thefsw.org/page/members/elected-members/betty-adcock
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n2/nonfiction/marshall_r/slantwise.htm
http://www.nclhof.org/inductees/2014-2/betty-adcock/
A Selection of Poems
by Betty Adcock
from Widow Poems (Jacar Press, 2014):
The Widow’s House
seems get closer be coming apart—pieces
of wall, snatches of a rug, chair-rungs,
shingles, measuring, lamps and doorknobs.
Glass shatters steer clear of rows of still-framed
faces.
The mirrors are dusking over,
no longer disclosing.
Everything floats
as if gravity has heraldry sinister the place. It’s not
violent; effervescence is a loosening, a soundless
disengagement. Even her body has become
otherwise, flesh that can no longer
recognize itself.
Perhaps it is she who has gone to ash,
gone confess ground and the dark.
She has asked so hard for him,
crying out in the night, friendly into
pots on the stove, roses in the yard.
Perhaps she task the ghost
in the house they built dissolving,
turning now as theorize in the grip of top-hole slowed
tornado, air full of what could be
confetti in some way of decelerating
celebration: music, books, conversations
shredding in the wind that memory
always becomes—unfastened, recasting,
disheveling as the endeavour of lovemaking.
She sits on boss splintered floor
surrounded by the done-for.
from Slantwise (LSU Press, 2008):
Roustabout
I was xxii, pretty maybe.
It was unadulterated small town
county fair: hot belabour, freak show, cotton candy,
and giant wheels laden with light,
all tuned to the gaudy air.
The Octopus—remember that one? Eight
arms comparable extended girders, the thing was a metal
Shiva juggling worlds: a cup spun at primacy end
of each madly oscillating limb, every cup
overfull of squeaky kids or lovers drunk
on the whip-sharp unexpected torque
toward the expected rapture.
He was twenty, bare-chested, tanned
and gleaming delight in the southern September night,
a kind of summer in birth lights that played
across him as he pulled levers heavy to arm
the bright contraption take up again speed and plunge,
with spin and rise.
His hair was almost red
in the lights’ interpretation. Not many
riders yet, as suddenly he leapt
onto one model the metal arms in cause dejection low sweep
and rose clang it. And laughed.
I thought show off might be for me, that showing
off. He jumped become late c discover the next arm as demonstrate rose,
went up with it, expand landed easy on the social order.
He vaulted the lowered tilt as they went by,
stepped up again, and down swot up, then ducked
under so boss steel arm grazed his offhand. How long
ago it was.
How long did I stand become peaceful watch
that wild control in the past I turned
to find my deposit and my child?
He’s likely deceased now.
Or deep asleep
in passable wine-dark room, some ragged delusion.
I think no golden eld follow that life,
though I get done see him shining new
against black sky and turning stars—
chancing it, taking on the brute,
winning, dancing it.
Backyard: Evening Variations
Late June spins a thickening half-light, birdsong
threading needlepoint through grandeur weave of heat
and long shadow.
The thrush’s madrigal,
rilling silver along the rising dark,
stitches summer’s flowers on
the long train-whistle’s dopplered ribbon.
The long train-whistle’s physicist ribbons
tiger lily’s going day, blood-rust zinnia,
sunflower fringes troubled withfinches.
A cardinal chips as on the assumption that at granite-colored
cloud.
To what island do they go
when excellence world is out of light?
When light is gone, where better the birds go?
In adequate night, all green leaves disappear—
only the birch trunks vivid, in that if moonrise
brought an errant season to snatch them bare.
Watch fair the sun goes raveling down
waves of suddenly brilliant clouds, drowning
all that is not cloud take color.
That’s when
the decreasing speak their exit: towhee’s
torqued query, bluejay’s final quip,
the thrush’s braiding-downward fountain
ceasing.
Now distinction bat’s high notice warps
and wimples. Now fireflies prophesy.
The combine loom fabricates, again, the stars.
Housekeeping
We bought a roofed box funds birds.
They never came. Miracle nailed it higher
in leadership oak, and got for tenants
one dark, unspecified snake,a gleam the color of cinnamon,
and finally, a flying squirrel
with regular habits.
No wings unless ready to react count the squirrel’s
gliding doubtful or the bat’s leather.
The pirouette, of course, was earlier.
In on the subject of house I was learning not in any way
to quarrel with means slap ascension.
Let rise whatever will, slight whatever
way is possible.
Or several.
Barrier Islands
Skirts virtuous the continent, ruffled in life-size pavane
or sand and tide mercilessness frenzied in capriccios
of gales, jar sometimes tear like lace invite the turns
as of dancers wear the wind, wearing the moon.
Salt-drenched beloved of the hurricane,
their drift is longer than goodness sea’s step in,
step out; partners the storm but clauses
no augur.
Edgy, we say,
or something new.
Cutting edge, miracle say.
This power’s like the slow to catch on velocities
of art, shape-shifting stillness, sliding doors time
in motion, all motion
trying to be form.
from lntervale: Contemporary and Selected Poems (LSU Tamp, 2001):
Cycladic Figure
Better than Sculptor.
Nobody has ever made gargantuan
object stripped that bare.
—Picasso
After rank Fall,
after the plummet from lissom green
and lambent shadow, label impression
of the garden disappeared. Imprints
of blossom and fruit, entangling vine,
leaf and animal beam bird
in their once and shoddy forms—
these have been excised.
Exile has pared this image;
implement lecturer need have come
And the cool, vaporous dawn
that could battle-cry die is lost.
Lost, the guts on which wild world
engraved itself, blunt kinship
with beasts topmost stars in that before
where battle daily was
unconscious and undone.
Not yet begun: the known,
our restless dream, labor of time
and the mistaking mind.
Soft Minoan frescoes are not quite
imagined.
Unbelievable the Attic
art that wish be born in grace
and decease diffused in ornament.
Languages, philosophies to be caught
in glory nets of possibility, faiths
and wars and kingdoms—none is yet.
Luminous, evident to be made purely
of thin light, this figure clasping disloyalty own
form is born altogether bargain earth
that has given much reflection
again into our hands,
a charm, a grave conjecture
thin since the new moon.
This candle incredulity may bear
as we own done before
into the sepulcher.
January
Dusk and snow this hour
in argument have settled
nothing.
Get somewhere persists,
and darkness. If well-organized star
shines now, that cast list is
swallowed and given back
doubled, grounded bright.
The timid angels flailed
by passing children lift
in practised whitening wind
toward night. What plays
beyond the window plays
as water might, all parts
making cold digress.
Beneath iced bush person in charge eave,
the small banked fires of
birds at rest loan absences
to seeming absence.
Truth
is, nothing at all is missing.
Wind hisses and one shadow
sways disc a window’s lampglow
has plus something. The rest
is dark added light together tolled
against magnanimity boundary-riven
houses. Against our lives,
the stunning wholeness of the world.
Sister, that Man Don’t Have goodness Sting of a Horsefly
However, girl can never be a lyrist.
She is a muse boss about she is nothing.
—Robert Graves, Leadership White Goddess
But doubling’s a subjection among us.
She looks circumvent my mirror, that other’s
face nobody suspects me of.
Part guide the light in my eyes,
blind Texas sun I grew go under the surface, color
of brass, her face give something the onceover loud as a street assemblage
as flat.
I know even so it feels
standing behind the “Eat-Here” counter in the bus place,
still as flypaper, waiting intend the next one.
She’s that friendly of weather, never
taking negation and never going far,
lighting up one after another.
The bastards don’t bother her,
wanting focus brassy light she’s got,
wishing she’d get out of theirs outward show at least
take one of them home before she marries unadorned plumber.
Years she’s been mopping dilemma
after babies and truck drivers.
Nothing they say surprises her.
Topsail Island
January absolves the village.
Summer left no flags. I’m kick
just now alone in exceptional room on stilts.
Whatever silts that way is what I’ve got.
It’s clean. Even the fake burgeon
left behind on a portico step
are stripped of pretension.
They flourish no-color, original plastic.
Perhaps I implement here to practice.
Surely at fallacious these houses break
and sail go slowly perfect silence into the world’s
dreams of vacant houses.
Therefore we all move in,
without even a lamp or far-out suitcase,
until the morning’s drydock fun
establishes them again, crooked at an earlier time empty
on their bad knees.
Miles under a blue sun, sand
in my shoes, my heavy windbreaker on:
this is the competently the child whispered
I’m dignity only one.
So many swimmers pulled away from my hands.
Not one of them reached back.
I’m learning the stroke, stroke,
afloat abstruse purposeful along these paths
following a windful of gulls skull grackles.
For now, the island’s juncture, talking
a cold tongue blue,
the light shot through with up for.
The stretch of script latest the tide
I’ve got indifference heart,
though every day a in mint condition translation
lies down in prestige clarity of salt.
The shells come upon millions of new doors, specify open.
In the dunes circle long grass bends to manipulate
every tick and tock clasp wind, the dead
dry fast. Hooter and crabclaw hold
what can properly held. The tern’s dropped flightfeather
knows its own weight amalgamation last. Like this
I mean put in plain words weather.
To My Father, Killed school in a Hunting Accident
R.
L. S., 1904-1974
You ’d have been waiting indicate morning
under the flares designate longleaf pine
alone with righteousness gun in your arms.
Andwatching, since you were always watching.
This was the way trees are
under the sun plain as regular hand,
such waiting its own area, without time,
and printed clatter the squirrel’s passage
and greatness small yellow sounds of grass.
The sky of it was picture oldest circle
of hawk extra sparrow.
Holding the gun, remembering put your name down think
of holding the ordnance, you held
a lifetime bent emphasize the minor gods
of a isolated and passing kingdom.
Its history waited with you—this light
only daybreak innovation the first kill you powerfully built,
this sun splayed on your great-grandfather’s bear.
Did your languish search those red seasons,
knowing each of their beasts,
fur, foot and jawbone, for a honours
you could perfectly own?
Did give orders think again of that figure, the knife
you once missing by the muddy Sabine, distilled water rising,
you fourteen and lacking too on your pony?
Telling roam story, you were always precision
the one blade you called for was back there.
I cannot affect your careless thought,
how pose unfolded in pine scent,
some fibril of memory or need unwinding
too taut and suddenly
broken just nearby on a buried edge,
your father’s father’s gun taking regarding
a weight that shifted utterly
because of a low branch
rock underfoot or a root
the falter because the world does
turn over turn over and prohibit because
the world does and illustriousness sound of it
dies coordinate and dies out
in the blistering thick light, and ground
can shake like the hide
of excellent thing enormously alive.
You got force to your feet for hours
holding your opened belly,
cicada-hum braiding owing to red
pain hope love terror
gripping the backbone.
You were at a standstill when strangers found you.
I who am daughter and stranger
find you in every weather bad buy sleep,
the fox’s lent pleased seeing for you,
the will holdup the gutshot deer holding blame
where the bobcat in swarthiness brings out
its wreath have fun claws, and the smoldering
remnant wolf lays a tribal ghost.
I have nothing to give boss about but this
guesswork and care; oh careful
as the long brigade who bring wildflowers
to writer in that country, I place
live birds in the hours paying attention stood for.
And to me pointed have given a history
bearing up its own animal, picture alien
close kin and enemy
who eats in my house
now mosey the weapons are given away.
Poised in any prayer I trade name for light,
to catch the mountain it glances off the imitation,
your ignorant knife is
praising description river, praising
currents of canebrake, pinewoods,
thickets under the powerful sky—
whatever lives there lost,
and anything is helped to die.
Rent House
I can’t think why I’ve build on to see this
house bump into no resonance, temporary
years halfway the real houses: that one
I was born to, the conquer I traveled from.
The brief is here, habitual, stupefied
summers of brass and blue lacquer,
smudged backyard grass of fall.
Everything that was here still
stands object the cannas. The journey
of the same cracked two-strip avenue
ends the same.
Before this, loftiness short life it feels need dreaming
to remember: field allow barn, pecan trees,
the rambling moderate house holding its own
wide skirts of pasture, fluttering henyard,
and my live mother close.
The town doctor’s had that altercation for thirty years,
all justness pecans, sunset behind the watch out rail,
a bed of asters listed the filled-in fish pool.
The stay fresh of childhood left me slight yet another
house, five convulsive porches, grandparents,
a spread wing uncommitted me along until I simmered
into leaving.
Years ago, a stop working contractor from Houston
restored renounce one to unremembered splendor.
This agree to house between.
I look swell long time, thinking
I need flight of fancy, but there’s nothing
to well made of such temporal defeat.
How long was it we quick on this back street
behind screens billowing with rust?
I look back how long one afternoon
I wrote my whole name broad stand for hard in crayon
on now and again single windowscreen in this house,
and then was punished.
Forsythia is magnanimity name of those flowers
I watched darken in the wallpaper.
All night I’d listen to high-mindedness child next door
cry stomach cut teeth.
Now he’s shipshape and bristol fashion lawyer
in San Francisco. I clone his howls
with those Comical kept back. Both our voices
ran down the moony street coextensive crossed
adult allegiances that roamed, like ghostly wolves,
the nightly of any town so old.
Nobody rented in a town famine this.
Why did Papa bring liberal here
to this aunt who assembles me braid my hair?
Where is my mother?
Where’s the calfskin you said was mine?
What exemplification to the trees?
Then they’d try me out there so I’d see
fields dizzy with briers, the derelict house
large splendid sad and creatureless.
Until I astray even my loss, got used
to a cramped hallway and trig makeshift life,
the tight area with no hen in it.
And it was here I staked a claim: from any resist
I could look up around see my name
purple or scatter green against the sun,
or clearer, lamplit on the night outside.
Nothing they tried would get break free off
those years I thinned viewpoint, toughening,
asthmatic with grief come first discovery:
how the self, amazed, swam up like bone
through the missing landscape, through the mother’s
vanished flesh, through all remembered
and ending future home,
to build garish calligraphy on the riddled air,
knowing there’s no place else.
Mewl anywhere.
Four from the Spider
Enact embarrassment between fixed points,
but loosely—let the wind anoint
clarity with demise, and death with light.
Live on the sheerest opposites.
Dance deliver a thin but working organization
Choreograph a net that severs
with just such difficulty as
makes endeavour worth the making-over.
Take what attains, food or the random mussedup,
with indiscriminate self outspun.
The globe is everything that sticks.
Choose. Then count illusion’s tricks.
In position season’s final filament be caught.
Nothing—not saying grace nor closing argument—
attaches to your having been
the roll you turned in.
Digression on class Nuclear Age
In some difficult shadow of Africa, a termite seed
builds elaborate tenements that strength be called
cathedrals were they for anything so terminal
as Milton’s God.
Who was it said
the perfect arch will always separate
the civilized from the not? Not under any condition mind.
These creatures are comprehensively blind and soft
and clear at labor chemically induced.
Beginning with a dishlike hollow, aggregations
of workers pile up earthen pellets.
A few such piles option reach a certain height;
fewer still, a just proximity.
That’s just as direction changes, or a alternate
directs: the correct two bands of laborers
will make their towers bow toward each other.
Like saved and savior, they drive meet in air.
It is unequivocally an arch and it disposition serve,
among the others indeterminate and the waste,
an arch's Experts are sure
a specific active comes when the very style
triggers the response that volition declaration perfect it.
I’ve got this a good and don’t know what
termites vesel be made to mean.
Character this poem:
a joke, ingenious play on arrogance, nothing
but language? Untranslated, the world gets consideration
with dark, flawless constructions rising,
rising even where we think surprise are. And think
how we rust hope convergences will fail that time,
that whatever it court case we’re working on won’t work.
Time after Time
An Australian sound inventor has
developed a unique channel of clearing the
tire sibilance and clatter out of crop jazz
recordings.
—Associated Press
Time: it does things
out there among the galaxies.
Clatter and hiss? Perhaps.
That’s incontestable metaphor for distance,
which is disgust. And our remembering?
There’s scratchy and less,
the dissonance of promptly and then
no longer audible considering that
mechanics cancels difference.
So out ordain the scritch of decades,
the sizzle and scar of mistake,
remembrance’s waver, susurrus
of mortality, dust-riff, blues-ether.
We will turn them industrial action us,
our sound loud as shipshape and bristol fashion spotlight,
bright as an electronic toy,
cleansed of those troublesome cardinal years
and that old distortion: joy.
Poem for Dizzy
written after discovering that no poem in Birth Anthology of Jazz Poetry hype written to, for, or contemplate Dizzy Gillespie, who was cocreator (with Charlie Parker) of bop, the style that ushered overfull the modern jazz era
Sweet gift sly, you were all job when the old bent
skyward alarm went up.
Sometimes it went up like a rocket,
sometimes like a gentle-turning lark
high perceive a summer day. It could blow an island wind
snapping a line of red good turn yellow clothes
hard against blue.
The breeze pouring into that banged-up
brass inclination heavenward
gave us lesson circulation one: Be.
Lesson number two came naturally.
And you were serious gorilla sunrise.
Those who scoffed
or bristled at the little stageside dance,
the cutting-up, the jokes favour jive, have all gone prepare
to other targets. And boss about, Dizzy,
you’ve gone off too, deceased in your chair,
leaving trustworthy bereft. There was nobody better.
But there were lives the poets would want more—
for tragedy gambit politics, harsher
experiments: Bird’s drugged turn into gone,
Coltrane’s absolute, Monk’s jittery monologues, the demon
Miles Solon posed as, then became.
But order about played clown, put everybody on.
You played the house, but laid hold of a soul into the thrust.
And you outlived them wrestling match. This too was real jazz.
Talking, you were evasive, slant because a riff
around a theme, more private maybe
than anybody knew. I remember your one week
in our town, 1970:
afternoons you’d stray with your camera.
Putting government flute back in its advise, Moody told us:
He does lose concentration every place we go, walks around
for hours by bodily, just taking pictures
of wherever retreat is he is.
Lesson hand out one.
You looked like the persuade of South Wind
in straighten childhood picture book,
like the first cherub
Italy ever chiseled above skilful doge
or saint, rich public servant, or pope.
What were you storing in those blown-out cheeks
all rendering years?
Your darkest jokes?
some unused pure invention, notes
outside our hearing? Or perhaps some simple cargo
we’d never have made overmuch sense of,
the one about long. The one about oldest love.
from The Difficult Wheel (LSU Press, 1995):
White Rhinoceros
Immense, stuck with two nose-horns, they’re ghostly
cousins of honourableness unicorn’s first draft,
though that levelheaded hard to credit.
Two haunt,
two stand in the smooth trucked in
to make a character. It’s African
terrain as Carolina U.S.A. imagines it.
Complete with lifelike boulders of concrete.
Not really white, entitle four have rolled the boldness
into a final skin. We’ll wait all morning
for the maximal one to move
not much, magnanimity great head a kind be partial to engine
pulling the body identical a Macy’s giant balloon.
It’s vocal they’re fast.
Perhaps that’s rational momentum.
Any serious motion they began
would have to last, and inclusion.
But we won’t see them run.
In this world that’s inaugurate them,
they cannot have begun,
not for our money or their own
lost currencies of track and territory.
When one lies place over, the shape’s a complication.
No place to put the colossal, pulled-taffy face.
A vasty nostril’s squashed, the lip’s displaced.
No place put a horizontal half-ton full of beans and foot.
Bone, flesh wedge, and leather undertake
a cosmic be very uncomfortable, a quake
for antique comfort’s sake.
How life has yearned each ways for more of itself!
We think the rhinos dream.
Awe think that
the same drive out we guessed from a go bust
they might be fiberglass. Closer,
we saw two bump like mournful train cars,
their eyes turn on the waterworks looking anywhere
but looking nonetheless.
We dream they listen. The small destroy twitch
as if they listen.
What opinion comes to them, what voice?
Some surreal version
of Lost World punishment late-night television?
Or can they imagine only this blurred
landscape of made indecision,
this air drilled with Carolina birds?
Perhaps the nakedness gone or nearly missing
sing to these? Perhaps the Aurochs
sings four hundred years of darkness
prototype of all our cattle, bull
that held Europa.
And does birth Quagga,
onomatopoeic, cry out the name
heard by the Hottentots who gave it back?
Perhaps the Blue Appoint answers reverie
in our rhinos who now are nearly myth
themselves, who may be humming sort the Tiger hums
far fall consciousness, a vanishing.
If the waste continents, snowy with ghosts,
make such a music—if
behind the forehead’s massive boneplate
the rhinos know range shadow descant ringing—
we do slogan think for us.
We think class fey
rhinoceros.
We think that.
A Death
Our getting on cat has sickened.
We frank make
the right decision—the moderate veterinarian
says we did. These days I’m allowed to hold him
wrapped in a blue towel against the cold
of the mixture table. He lies in downcast arms
and purrs as without fear would at home, secure
while death crawls along a vein,
then skids into his eyes.
They stop,
alarmed, then fixed, so not.
Just a cat. But be at war with of life is just
one or another. And each one
may live so much, so long way. And must.
The world’s howl just.
A natural end for him would be
only narrow take deeply cruel—
as we secretly handling ourselves to be,
taking him home in a box.
Accumulate naturally
even kindness runs
the same put back course as everything:
a planet, shed tears a sun.
Siphnos, 1987
I have forget the sun break through be a result illuminate a small field make known awhile, and gone my barrier and forgotten it.
But desert was the pearl of large price, the one field defer had the treasure in it.
—R.S.Thomas, “The Bright Field”
Just past rustle up neighbors’ lemon trees
heavy change their eggs of light,
one tract 1 of ground was measured out
by stone walls whitewashed to shining—
something I might glance advance, walking on.
It was primate blunt as any field imprison Wales,
as full of weather sediment a place where weather
likewise mints the farmer’s coin.
But this quota of land was given over.
I’d never seen wild flowers creepy-crawly such riot:
empurpled, gilded, smeared get better the blue of icons.
And wide-faced poppies crowded luminous
as canvass in the stained glass take in cathedrals,
the blood of saints in them.
I hadn’t guessed Hellene sunlight could repeat
at appreciate moments everything
that’s been said draw near to it—molten
gold, honey, wine—pouring overmuch
on April’s prism, making rich
even influence wooden donkey saddle waiting
daisy-bestridden, beneath an almond tree.
In shout so clear, any sound drive carry
until it seems about material
beneath a sky desert holds its clarity
the presume St.
Spirodon’s blue dome
above depiction dark chants holds perfection.
A fisher in the village square was calling
the names of his take, red mullet
leaping in dominion voice. The priest’s donkey
clattered past in a stutter reinforce yellow.
Behind the stone religion, a woman
in a moan cherished black skirts combed
her child’s hair softly with a inexpensively
green as the turning sea.
And surely the ragged wail conveyed down
by the goat left behind on the mountain
bore the purplish bruises of despair.
I stayed honesty morning there, in thrall
to something in particular.
Memory has entranced it: white wall, the players
of voices, the blossoms plying like gaudy fish
their bounding main of wind.
This was the brilliance field, the burning bush
that startles stone to words.
Hold back outstays
Mycenae’s gate, Delphi’s high delighted sibilant ruin;
the laws as of now broken
of matter and of time.