Shelby Stephenson, is author of
Family Matters: Homage to July, the
Slave Girl winner of the coveted Bellday
Poetry Prize for 2008. For
Dr. Stephenson, a veteran of thirty years
in the department of English at Pembroke
College and longtime editor of
UNCP’s distinguished literary journal,
Pembroke Magazine, Family Matters makes his
10th poetry collection publication and his fifth major
award. Stephenson reports
that the idea for Family Matters came—as
so many of them do—serendipitously, yet
almost inevitably. While leafing through
materials laid out on his sister’s desk (she
had been researching Stephenson family
history), he came upon a document he
found both deeply disturbing and im-
mensely inspiring: an 1850 deed con-
firming his great-great-grandfather’s sale
of a ten-year-old slave girl named “July.”
(See list of book publications below)
Poems by Shelby Dean Stephenson will be featured throughout the month
of June here. Read, enjoy and leave your comment.
EPISTEMOLOGY
for Ronald H. Bayes
"Imagine the enlightenment or ignorance of our
nature in a figure."–Socrates, "The Allegory of the Cave,"
Plato's REPUBLIC, BOOK 7.
I believe in an aristocracy
which has a grease pit of autocracy
with one supreme monkey autonomous under us all,
including a little sideshow
symbolic of nothing I can imagine,
constructed so the matter loses charisma,
energy lying limp as a goose's neck on a block
after the axe has fallen into the collected aims of concept and concussion,
where all statements of creation are wrong except the one
stoical holding out for the "I."
Appearances are phenomenal,
positive and pragmatic as the old
predestination which holds me in a sling of fate.
Echoes lead to other voices, other rooms.
Home is where peripheries are.
Previously published inCairn)
APPLE BLOSSOM WHITE
I
Now one time I had an apple orchard
And time was apple blossom white
With a heaven made in treecrotches.
The mules spraddled their legs, blinked pink aftermaths of pissing.
Roadapples I stored for bases in the yard.
Across the dirtroad the garden lay,
Paradise of okra, peanuts, gardenpeas, squash, tomatoes,
Maytle Samantha’s slip falling below her hem,
Cucumbers, potatoes, radishes, turnips, butterbeans, collards,
My bare feet hopping clods.
The hedges were handsome as the doves
I stalked with my Daisy:
Hi yo Silver
Saddled me
And we rode from gummy, tobaccoblooming fields
The ten miles to town−
Warehouses−the smell of cured tobacco
I chewed in those suncured days
The Neuse River rippled with shad,
The farmers on the banks working their seines.
My seat, a burlap sheet torn in two−Middle Creek!−
Leafboats sank in puddles kicking round
Beaver Dam where flapping tails went silly
And teeth
Gnawed tulip poplars down.
Thicksmellingrich with cornshucking and fall’s fodder
I stripped and tied in bundles
Shocks beside haystacks,
The caves underneath where I jumped a rabbit
And sat to watch for the orchard boy.
II
It is a roundabout sleight
January whiffs over hogs,
Flatbedtight,
The boy’s nose a running sight.
Bloodkill
Dangles over dogs
Howling for a morsel
Dripknifecarves.
Previously published in Cave Wall)
Publications and Prizes as listed in Poet and Writers Directory
Books:Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl (Bellday Books, 2008), Possum (Bright Hill Press, 2004), Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, 2002), The Persimmon Tree Carol (Juniper Press, 2002), Fiddledeedee (The Bunny & The Crocodile Press, 2001), Poor People (Nightshade Press, 1998), Plankhouse (North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1993)
Chapbooks:Possum (Bright Hill Press, 2004)
Journals:Bits, BLINK: A Little Magazine of Little Poems, Carolina Quarterly, Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest
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