Dear Kakalak Poets, Artists, and Friends:

It is with regret we announce there will be no further issues of Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets in the foreseeable future.

Over the past four years, it has been our great honor to compile and publish some of the finest poetry and art in the Carolinas.  We have held readings in libraries and bookstores in the mountains and piedmont and at the coast.  We have featured work from poets laureate of both states, as well as works from first-time-published poets. For the past three years, we’ve featured a special contributor’s section highlighting the previous years’ winners of the poetry and art prizes.  This section showcased new works from those individuals.  And we’ve awarded thousands of dollars in prize monies to well-deserving poets and artists.

We are to some extent a victim of our own success.  From the first contest with upwards of 1100 entries and on, this process has been bigger and better than we expected.  We are proud of the quality of each of our four editions.  Each year, our aim was to improve on the book from the year before. We took time off this year to determine how we could best improve the quality of both the anthology and our service to contributors. Sadly, we determined that to improve Kakalak going forward would require more time, more money, more resources than we are able or willing to provide. 

That said, it’s been a wonderful ride.  It has been a joy to showcase such fine work.  Over the years, the Kakalak readings have brought together the poetry community, allowing for friendships and inspiration. The process has taught us much about poetry and editing.  We are the better for serving our fellow poets and artists these past four years.

The new year will see us each working on books of our own.  Look for them late this year or early next. We hope to keep in touch with the Kakalak community.  Send us news of your successes and work.  And thank you for your support and interest.

All our best,

Richard Allen Taylor
Beth Cagle Burt
Lisa Zerkle
co-editors, Kakalak:  Anthology of Carolina Poets

Kakalak 2009 Anthology of Carolina Poets
Beth Cagle Burt, Richard Allen Taylor, and Lisa Zerkle (editors), Bob Hicok (poetry contest judge)
Kakalak Poetry
ISBN Number: 9781599481982

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft

          Each year when reviewing the latest Kakalak Anthology, I like to remind non-Carolinian readers what this (perhaps) unfamiliar term means. “Kakalak” is a regionalism defined, roughly, as being able to laugh and joke about one’s origins while still feeling proud and affectionate towards them. The term, I think, is a fitting name for this yearly collection. Although few poets featured in the annual Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets (put out by Kakalak Poetry and printed by Carolina publisher Main Street Rag) write on similar subjects, and even fewer spend time gently mocking their roots, nearly all of them have one thing in common: a fondness for the region that pulses steadily, like a heartbeat, behind their words. This has been true of every Kakalak Anthology I have picked up since 2006, and true for 2009’s installment. The poets represented here share a love for language, imagery, landscape, people, and concerns that are unique to their home states, making each book invaluable reading for anyone interested in the poetry and culture of the Carolinas.

          Being something of a standard for poetry in two states certainly isn’t easy, but Kakalak never disappoints in its range and scope. The most current volume is no exception. As usual, the anthology is divided up into three sections: award winning poetry, special guest contributors (winners of the previous year’s Kakalak poetry and art prizes), and the longest section, that featuring selected poets, photographers, and artists. I have always found it most helpful to evaluate each section individually.

          As always, this year’s award-winning poems and art pieces are a diverse lot, ranging from discussions of famous artists’ inner lives (Alice Owens Johnson’s “Reading Frida’s Letters in Oaxaca” and Alex Grant’s “Marc Chagall’s Lament”), bloody dreams of cleavers and meat (“The Butcher’s Dream”), and, of course, the meditations on landscape and nature in such pieces as Allison Elrod’s “First Fig,” Jeff Miles’ “Good Days, Bad Days,” and Kakalak perennial Steve Lautermilch’s “The Cave Language of Hands.”

          Interestingly, several of the poems in this year’s Kakalak also seemed to center on family, parenting, and motherhood in particular. This perhaps unconscious theme begins among the award winners’ section, where three of the nineteen poems specifically addressed mothers: Phoebe Davidson’s “Somebody’s Mother,” Genie Cotner’s “Pieta” and Leslie M. Rupracht’s playful “Milk.” All three of these poems stood out for me because of their attention to detail, their sharp imagery, and their overall inventiveness. “Milk” discusses the intimate act of breast feeding in a poem shaped like an upright breast. The others focus on a less happy theme: a mother’s grief for a dead son. In “Somebody’s Mother,” the boy has been killed in a car accident. In “Pieta,” written after Michelangelo’s famous sculpture (and here reproduced in full), he has, of course, been crucified. The language of this poem, its quiet meditation upon motherhood and loss, and the sharp, stark tear streak of a line it creates on the page all make it, I think, the outstanding poem in this section.

Unfinished, broken,
abandoned, 

yet in Mary, a grief
I can’t look away from.

Surely she begged her son
not to go. She knew

he wasn’t hers alone,
but not this

descent of his body

into her arms, brush
of his face against hers.

In the piazza,
moan of a cello,

weight of the bow
against strings.

          The winners of the Kakalak 2008 Poetry and Art Prizes are, respectively, Carolyn Moore and photographer Kathleen Pompe. In another serendipity in this most serendipitous series installment, the work of both women fits together so seamlessly that one might think they were collaborators. Moore’s language is rich, complex, humorous, often contrary, and deeply enamored of contrasts: madness and humor, light and shadow, contemporary and classical. Indeed, one of my favorite things about Moore’s Kakalak 2009 poems are the seamlessness with which they build upon the work of modern and Elizabethan poets. “The Laundress Sings to the Dress Shirt Without Mentioning Poetry” recalls Pablo Neruda, and “After the Reading: The Celebrity Poet Fields Questions from the Audience” discusses the relationship of poet and audience in subtle—and magnificently loquacious—iambic pentameter.

          The pieces that I liked best, however, were Moore’s two riffs on Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress.” “To His Dead Mistress” retools Marvel’s poem line by line in a piquant examination of adultery and marriage, and the function of desire in each. Only, her retooling is anything but slavish and uninspired, for Moore possesses and understands the keys of Metaphysical poetry, from its wit and sense of wonder to the very idea of Metaphysical conceit itself.

Had we but whirled enough in sin
our love could not have shrunk this thin
and listless in its present way
so counter to our first loveplay.
You by your bygone spouse’s side,
once dreamed of me. I, by the tide
of my ex wheezing in her sleep
did dwell on you. Thus could we keep
alive the construct now stretched dead
between us in our married bed.
My vegetable love ceased to grow
vast in appetite, yet slow,
once we became each other’s lot
and faced the truth our love is not
for daily use in open sight.
Why did we quit the odd, sly night
filched twice a month? And for what reason,
trade blazing hours for this cold season?
Why did we not foresee this state
of loving at so low a rate?

          Moore takes up the poem again in “Improbable Punctuation: Sleep as Parentheses,” a far more open retooling which views sleep as a parenthesis framing dreams like mining town “melodramas…for tourists’ bucks and howls.” Astonishingly, she keeps both Marvel’s meter, rhyme scheme, and his sense of wonder even as she bends open the bones of his poem stylistically and imagistically.

And then comes sleep cupping the night
like hands that frame the stage asides

in melodramas mining towns
act out for tourists’ bucks and howls,

the church choir tarted up as whores
singing “Oh Susanna” once

the hero fists the villain well
(and sends him to his sentence, jail.)

          As Moore’s work is frequently a pastiche of past and present, so too are many of Pompe’s photographs. They treat as their subjects the Alhambra’s “Staircase in the Palace of Charles V,” the interior of the Alcazar (“Interior, the Alcazar”), and architect Antonio Gaudi (“Antonio Gaudi’s Room of a Hundred Columns”), focusing on each structure’s line and the play of light upon their brilliant surfaces. But like Moore, Pompe shows an interest in making these old buildings new. In “Interior, the Alcazar,” she has manipulated a digital self-portrait above the room’s still fountain, to “[introduce] an enigmatic entity—observer, witness, participant.” She casts a similar self-portrait into a stark puddle photographed in Barcelona, which contains a feather and reflects a storm grate, passers-by, and clouds. This brilliant combination of image and word made the guest section, for me, the most striking part of this year’s book.

          Now might be a good time to discuss the art featured elsewhere in the book. In past years, I have mentioned—perhaps somewhat unfairly—that some of the images included in the Kakalak anthologies have been blurry, or appear to have been color images that did not translate well into a black and white scan or photograph. Given the limits of printing and the prohibitive cost of color images, however, I tried not to harp too much on what truly was a minor inconvenience. Still, I was pleased to note that the image quality in this year’s incarnation had remarkably improved. Without exception, each artwork scan is crystal clear and precisely in focus. Further, each seems to have made the transition from color to black and white quite well. Along with Pompe’s work, particularly striking selections for me included Gwen Saunders’ provocative and whimsical “Tree Huggers,” a pen and India ink drawing; Terry Butler’s mixed media “Maasai Prince,” (which called to mind the so-called “primitive” style of Colonial American portraits); Lautermilch’s photograph “Steps of Stone” (which inspired a poem of the same name by Jeff Miles); and Susan Fecho’s imaginative mixed media “Country Kitchen.” As usual, the artwork selection is diverse in content, style, and media, and definitely one of the things that makes the Kakalak anthologies such outstanding collections.

          The book’s final section contained strong work from several Carolina poets, including Wayne Cox’s enigmatic (and somewhat speculative) “The Night Watchman on His Beat”; Steve Mitchell’s achingly vulnerable “Where It Hurts,” about the embarrassment a scar causes a lover during sex; David T. Manning’s “Tributaries,” about the interplay of dream and waking life; and Susan Meyers’ “Morning After the Hailstorm,” told in language as scattered and crisp as the ice balls that beat down “the herbs” (peppers too) and tear the “umbrellas of squash leaves.”

          While the Kakalak anthologies have always been superbly edited to include poems with similar subjects side by side, I was quite pleased to see some themes emerging in the work chosen for this year’s selected poetry and artwork section. Most interestingly, the theme of motherhood (which I mentioned before) cropped up here again, with nearly one-fifth of the poems being dedicated to mothers in some form or other. Cheryl Boyer talks about the strangeness of babies and their eating habits in “Clear,” Doris Thomas Browder writes a particularly striking memory of a mother in “Clearing Out Mother’s Room,” and Ed Devany contemplates his conception in a poem of the same title (here reproduced in full) in language both religious and earthy.

1929, just before Advent

Imagining my parents conceiving me in despair
after the great Market plunge of 1929,
an epiphany—I am the product of human beings,
approachable, similar, real—a father out of work,
a mother who only recently lost twin boys,
both far removed from their original families and homes.

Did they undress in dark, slip shyly under still cold sheets,
try not to remember all around them others of their kind were
jumping out of windows to their deaths?
Did they feel The Great Unknown between them like a bundling board?
How did they find a way to get across it, my jobless,
wounded, frightened mother and father?

If any of their parents, uncles, aunts had been in the room
I know they’d have shouted urgently Stop!! Don’t do it!!
But they did, in spite of everything, creating in the midst of chaos,
of intermingled cries of furious lust, indescribable pain, release,
relief, renewal, doubt, depression, letdown, the sense two total
strangers and survived the storm, wondering what they were doing
in each other’s beds. No wonder the ancients decided Christ had
to have been conceived immaculately.

          I have loved the Kakalak anthologies since their beginning in 2006, and think that the collection gets stronger with each passing year. Although the book will, sadly, take a hiatus in 2010 as the organizers decide how the organization should grow and change, I look forward to seeing what Zerkle, Taylor, and Burt will do in 2011. Once again, I enthusiastically recommend this year’s anthology—and indeed, all anthologies past—to not only readers interested in Southern poetry and Americana, but also to those who want a truly entertaining and thoughtful read from some of Carolina’s most talented voices.