|
Sharing the importance of names, places
We’re sort of partial to the written word here in the newsroom, so it was easy to nod eagerly when North Carolina’s poet laureate – none other than Cullowhee’s Kay Byer – offered us a monthly column she’s planning to write.
Kay’s first installment will debut in next week’s Sylva Herald, and she stopped by the Cafe to update us on plans to share her thoughts on the importance of language with newspaper readers here and across the state.
“I began to think about a column as soon as I began considering options for laureate projects,” Kay said, adding that Fred Chappell had done a monthly review of current books by Tar Heel poets when he held the post. While that worked well for Chappell, Kay had a different idea.
“I wanted to take on some of the issues concerning language, reading, poetry – and the importance of all that – in ways that were accessible to just about anyone,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed working in prose.”
According to Kay, her first effort, titled “Wild Hydrangea,” is a good example of planned 500-word columns that “take off from a scene or something I’ve read that either disturbs me or excites me.”
Her columns won’t be limited to poetry – they’ll be flexible and open enough to let Kay reflect on various themes, ideas and concerns. One thing she said that resonated with us was the importance of language and landscape – how the experience of knowing and naming a place well keeps language rich and alive.
“When I first moved to the Western North Carolina mountains in 1968 to teach at Western Carolina University, I entered a place that was largely unnamed in my imagination – terra incognita,” Kay said. “I couldn’t really begin to grasp where I was until I began to know the names of the roads, coves, neighborhoods ... there was Speedwell, where I first rented an apartment, there was the Tuckaseigee River, Wayehuttta, Caney Fork, Buzzard’s Roost ... soon the names had mapped the place for me and made it real in a way it had not been before. And in every name, some sort of story was waiting.”
According to Kay, the book “Arctic Dreams” by Barry Lopez has influenced her recent thinking. Lopez, who began to publish in the 1970s, has continued to write about the various landscapes in which he has lived.
In “Arctic Dreams,” Lopez writes of a threatened landscape that had been and continues to be exploited and changed by exploration and development, first by whalers and now by oil and mining companies, not to mention global warming, Kay said.
“These pieces have special pathos now as we begin to realize how threatened the Arctic really is by global warming that is melting the ice caps and driving these animals out of their habitat, not to mention its effect on the native people living there. Their way of life is threatened with extinction,” Kay said, adding that she sees a local corollary because Jackson County’s mountains are similarly threatened by development and exploitation.
“This landscape is being changed before our eyes by political and economic forces over which we feel we have little control,” she said. “The landscapes we love and call by the names we know are being ‘developed’ into gated communities, for example, where local people will not be allowed, where faceless corporations rule and set their own rules, indifferent to our region’s history and culture.
“How can our stories, our lore, our sense of place and all that means, stand against these forces?” Kay asks.
Returning to Lopez’ writing, Kay says that while the author is not optimistic, he makes an important point about what he calls “the literature of hope,” and believes that if writers encourage this sense of hope, then “people will exercise their imaginations in ways we can’t foresee.”
“I have to believe that my imagining a story will somehow help people imagine a way around difficulty,” Lopez writes. “Stories ... are blueprints for the imagination.”
And, Kay says, so are poems, plays and essays, as well as the words we share with each other every day.
“This is not the language of corporate boardrooms or institutional committees, this is the language that matters – that keeps us alive,” she said.
And it’s the language of community newspapers like this one, which are the main vehicles for recording a specific locale’s daily history. Where else but in The Sylva Herald can residents of this area find news of all the church singings and benefits – the notices that connect us to the past with their references to places like Beta, Willets and Fall Cliff, which once were thriving communities with their own post offices?
That sense of place Kay describes is reflected in The Sylva Herald’s care in distinguishing Addie from Beta or Lovesfield from Ashe Settlement.
Starting next week, we’ll hear more from our state (and also local) poet laureate about the language we share and its importance.
|
