Delmarva Today: 2-4-21
Wilson’s guest on Delmarva Today is Poet Laureate for Salisbury, Maryland, Nancy Mitchell. Nancy has published extensively, is a 2012 Pushcart Prize winner, and is Associate Editor of Special Features for Plume, an online poetry magazine. Her poetry offers the direct experience of events lived and felt. They are organized in such a way that the ordinary becomes extraordinary and takes on a new meaning for the reader. CLICK TO LISTEN
Nancy’s poetry offers the direct experience of events lived and felt. They are organized in such a way that the ordinary becomes extraordinary and take on a new meaning for the reader. Let me offer an example with the following poem “Ceremony.”
Into the small hole your wife poured a stream
of ashes, then dropped the pair of dog tags
that clinked your slog through napalm fog then hung
two decades from your Saab’s rear-view mirror.
Unstrung beads from Belize slipped your daughter’s fingers
like blue glass seeds while your son let fly a clutch
of red hawk, owl and osprey feathers scavenged
on walks with you along the river. We who could sing
sang Amazing Grace, and passed the lit sweet-grass
braid, its wispy wreath wrapping us.
Nostalgia is not the right word to describe the feeling that this poem, evokes. There is nothing wistful here, no desire to return to some suggested past. We are simply placed in that time. We feel the weight of the day. The pouring of the ashes, the clink of the dog tags, the feathery weight of the beads slipping past fingers. There is no metaphor here, no simile, no illusory trick to stir the intellect. And yet we are wrapped in the texture, the heaviness of the day and it is the 1960s. And it is Vietnam all over again.
She will take you places you have never been.