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Byer promotes poetry across state, publishes new book
By Lynn Hotaling
 It’s been a busy 12 months for Cullowhee’s Kay Byer, who became North Carolina’s poet laureate this time last year.
She’s crisscrossed the state conducting workshops and doing poetry readings; established a poetry section on the N.C. Arts Council Web site; and published her sixth volume of poetry, “Coming to Rest,” just out from Louisiana State University Press.
Byer has spent a good portion of her first year as poet laureate inside the state’s classrooms, sharing her expertise with some of North Carolina’s future poets. Six local students, all eighth-graders at Scotts Creek Elementary School, will be featured as poets of the week March 27-April 2 online at the arts council site (www.ncarts.org). Poems by the Scotts Creek students – Ana-Maria Balta, Cheyenne Mathis, Trenton Miller, Kasey Hensley, Heather Ensley and Montana Frady – will be paired with verses by eighth-graders at Cary Academy, another school Byer has visited.
Byer said she is pleased by all the poetry that has developed during her classroom visits, and described the local students’ work as “more playful” than the poetry of their Cary counterparts.
Poetry by Scotts Creek Elementary School eighth-graders – from left, Ana-Maria Balta, Cheyenne Mathis, Trenton Miller, Kasey Hensley and Heather Ensley – will be featured next week on the N.C. Arts Council Web site, www.ncarts.org. The students wrote poems under the direction of North Carolina’s poet laureate, Kay Byer of Cullowhee. Eighth-grade English teacher Phil Woody spearheaded the effort and wrote poetry along with his students. Eighth-grader Montana Frady, whose poem will also be included online, is not pictured.
“I’d like to feature more poetry coming out of the classroom,” she said.
According to Scotts Creek eighth-grade English teacher Phil Woody, Byer’s visit was a good experience for his students.
“One told me (Byer) inspired him to write more,” Woody said. “I think the biggest thing the students took from her time with us was the idea of taking one simple word and letting your mind and experiences go from there. She emphasized to them that a poem doesn’t have to sound elaborate or be long.”
Another school-related project Byer is spearheading for the state is “Poetry Out Loud,” a sort of “poetry bee,” in which students memorize a poem and then recite it in competition. This year’s national effort is a pilot program that’s limited to state capitals, so only Raleigh-area high school students are eligible to participate, Byer said. The competition should expand statewide next year, she said.
As poet laureate, Byer has led a series of workshops for Wake County teachers and will be one of the judges at the April 20 state Poetry Out Loud finals at Knightdale High School.
“The assumption is that being able to hear poetry read well aloud will get people interested,” Byer said of Poetry Out Loud. “That’s how it was done long ago.”
North Carolina’s poet laureate, Kay Byer of Cullowhee, reads aloud during a recent workshop at the N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching as center fellow Donna Glee Williams listens. – Herald photo by Nick Breedlove
Despite her hectic year, Byer found time to put the finishing touches on the poems she included in “Coming to Rest,” which she describes as “going back to my Georgia roots.”
Byer, who was born and raised in Camilla, in south Georgia, said she took the book’s title from a poem by Seamus Heaney, and that many of its poems are about “leaving and coming back.” A number are poems she started years ago – some as far back as childhood – and completed for the book, which is dedicated to her daughter, Cory. The volume deals with “mother/daughter feelings,” and many are about “letting go,” Byer said.
The book’s middle section, “Singing to Salt Woman,” is dedicated to the memory of Alice Mathews, who was a history professor at Western Carolina University.
“Coming to Rest” contains a number of different poetry styles, Byer said, including a “ghazal,” an old Persian form; a sonnet; a villanelle, which is highly repetitious with a strict rhyme scheme; a sestina, in which six chosen words are repeated in a particular order; and a paradelle, which Byer said is a form made up by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins as a joke that other poets have begun to try to write.
The collection has already garnered praise from other poets, including WCU’s John Parris Professor, Ron Rash.
“Byer journeys through time and place, following the compass of her heart, and our hearts as well, for her words transcend the personal as they navigate the complex, difficult terrain between the abiding grief of loss and, as Wordsworth says, the need to find strength in what remains behind,” Rash writes.
Byer’s selection as poet laureate is not the first time she’s been honored by Gov. Mike Easley. She received the North Carolina Award in literature in 2001 because of her “celebration of this state’s human spirit through her poetry,” according to her citation, which also says she writes “poems that are stirring and haunting, particularly when she gives voice to the women of Appalachia.”
Byer has lived most of her adult life in Cullowhee. A graduate of Wesleyan College in Macon, Ga., she earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
She is the author of five collections of poems, “Wake” (2003), “Catching Light” (2002), “Black Shawl” (1998), “Wildwood Flower” (1992) and “The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest” (1986).
“Wildwood Flower received the Lamont Poetry Prize and “Black Shawl” received the Roanoke-Chowan Award and Brockman-Campbell Award. “Catching Light” was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and received the Southeast Booksellers Association Best Book of the Year in Poetry Award in 2003.
Byer has served as poet-in-residence at both Western Carolina University and Lenoir-Rhyne College. She is also a former poetry instructor in the Master’s of Fine Arts Program at UNC-G and has served on the boards for the N.C. Writer’s Network, Writer’s Workshop and The Arts Journal.
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