Kathryn Kirkpatrick HAS BEEN NAMED POET OF THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY 2012. Two Poems and Bio.

Here "Above the Frost Line," Award Winning Poet, Kathryn Kirkpatrick has been named Poet of the Month for February 2012 in this her birth month.

Biography for Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Raised in the nomadic subculture of the U.S. military, Kathryn Kirkpatrick was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and grew up in the Phillipines, Germany, Texas and the Carolinas.  Today she lives with her husband, Will, and their two shelties in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and she currently holds a dual appointment at Appalachian State University as a Professor in the English Department and the Sustainable Development Program. She has a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, where she received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize.  Her poetry collections include The Body’s Horizon (1996), which was selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Brockman-Campbell award; Beyond Reason (2004), which was awarded the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association; Out of the Garden (2007), which was a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association poetry award; Unaccountable Weather (2011) recently published by Press53. 


TWO POEMS by Kathryn Kirkpatrick:

From Beyond Reason (Pecan Grove Press, 2004)

Originally published in Kalliope

FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN SOLOS IN A FIXED-WING, HEAVIER THAN AIR MACHINE, 1910

I dreamed of flying under bridges

upside-down

                    or diving swift-like toward

the rushing ground at Curtiss Field.

                                                         He says

I'm just to check the wires, guide forward

and then back across the runway,

                                                    says if

I crashed they’d blame his Pusher plane

or him.

             To teach a woman how to lift

herself from earth in this frail fabric plane

is bad enough,

                      but flight, alone, intoxicates

like drink, like money, power.

                                               So when I find

the throttle lever blocked and take

away the piece of wood,

                                     I know the price

they’ll pay, years on, to see me risk my neck,

a freak because I’m first.

                           My hands are ice.

From Out of the Garden (Mayapple Press, 2007)

First published in The Florida Review

These Things No Longer Suffice

And I was walking in Chicago

with unnecessary purchases

or rather,
            they were necessary in that intangible way

like it is necessary to see a blackcap chickadee
light on a redbud in bloom.

It was something in clay

and something in paper

and I felt a little of that glow one feels

in the sensuous and material,

shorn up and satisfied

                                    for a moment

and saying how much I’d spent

when he stepped up with his empty

cup and it felt arbitrary

as wind not rain

that he had the cup

and reached it toward me

and I had the bags

and quickened my pace.

Why he with the empty cup?

And me with the laden bags?

I know the body is a reasonable animal.

Give it pure water, good food,

nest it in sheets washed clean.

Offer a share of touch.

And beauty. Give its sight beauty,

an arch of forsythia in spring.

Anger loses its urgent beat.

The claw of want retracts.

Why he with the empty cup?

And me with the laden bags?

What once would have sufficed,

the something in paper, the something in clay,

no longer sufficed.

Joy, that fragile wing, folded.

I wanted to say, paper, clay.

Because you are without pure water, good food,

I am without my small wing of joy.

I wanted to say, paper, clay.

If my laden bags require

your empty cup,

I give them back,

I give them back.

Now where is your wing,

O where is your wing of joy?

Please leave a comment here or

send the poet a comment if you wish.

kirkpatrick@appstate.edu