Is Poetry Art? Bettie Mixon Sellers said, "A Poem is Like a Painting."

"A poem is like a painting," Bettie M. Sellers said. It was years ago, must have been in the 1970s, when I first heard her reading some of her poems at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC. She was reading from a collection titled Westward from Bald Mountain. That evening, I learned that Brasstown Valley is a geographical region covering both Brasstown Bald Mountain in the north Georgia Mountains, the place of her poems, and the same region, crossing the Georgia state line covering the valley and small village of Brasstown that is the home of the folk school.

Bettie M. Sellers talked about two of her poems in particular, one being like a landscape painting and the other being like a portrait painting. I wrote down every word she said. After her poetry reading, we talked about how we were kin by marriage but more kin by poetry.

During this, her birth month, Bettie Mixon Sellers is our featured poet for MARCH 2009. Here are two more of her poems,
a landscape and a portrait.



BRASSTOWN VALLEY by Bettie M. Sellers

How fair the mountains
when willows green-out on the valley floor,
feathery light against spruce and pine,
and Jack-in-the-Pulpit thrusts his red-tipped spikes
up through warming leaf mold.
How fair the mountains
when sourwood waves spicy white flags
to tempt the roving bees,
and blue mid-summer's haze hides in distant
ridge indistinct as behind a soft veil.
How fair the mountains
when autumn unfolds a patch-work quilt
of red and gold and brown;
when day is warmed and yellow to touch,
and nights come crisp and cool.
How fair the mountains
when pines, ice-sparkled, bend on Cedar Ridge;
when February snow has hushed all sound
except a passing crow, and Brasstown waits,
asleep in winter sun.




OLD MAN OF THE WILDERNESS by Bettie M. Sellers

Persistent as ferns in moist earth,
Will stands beside Big Bald Creek,
his body flowing with the landscape
as easily as the current emerges
from Enotah's height
to tumble down the valleyside.
Quartz-flecked as a gray stone
shines in a shadowy place,
his eyes under grizzled brows
glint promise of another spring
and laurel petals on the stream.
Then he speaks and tall pines echo
as ageless wind song
unchanged by roaring jets
the leave their insubstantial trails
white above the mountain.

--Bettie M. Sellers


Dear Reader. Of the poems presented this month
by Poet of the Month Bettie M. Sellers, which one
do you like best?

More poems will be posted near the end of the
month on Bettie's birthday.

Comments?

SONNET IN STAINED GLASS by Bettie M Sellers

My father's house is slowly falling down
since no one is about to tend the creaks
in sagging floors or smear tar on the leaks
that drip in widening circles dark and brown.
The slanting chimney drops a loosened stone
clattering down the roof of rusted tin;
and windows gape like old men caught in
toothless yawns that breathe a sigh and moan.

But lately I have hung its ancient door
from hand-wrought hinges of a new design.
Remembered shadows I hold rightly mind
are dancing green and amber on my floor
where summer afternoons, the sun will trace
a wicker chair, my father's face.


Previously published, and included in the collection
MORNING OF THE RED-TAILED HAWK,
(1981) Green River Press
University Center, Michigan 48710




Bettie M. Sellers, Poet of the Month
at LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE
(for the Month of March, 2009)


Bettie M. Sellers

EDUCATION:

B.A., LaGrange College, laGrange, Georgia, 1958

M.A., University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 1958

Further Study: Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont;

Schiller College, Paris, France;

North Georgia College, Dahlonega, Georgia;

Summer Sessions through University of California, Berkley (at Oxford University, England University of Kent, Cantebury, and a three week session of Anthropology of the Greek Bronze Age in Grece and Crete, 17 Bronze Age sites)

NEH Summer sessions on Modern Poetry at Yale University, on Greek and Roman Culture at Ohio State Univesity, on Greek Tragedy at Dartmouth College, and on Greek and Roman Comedy at The University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Honorary Doctorate of Literature, LaGrange College 1989


TEACHING EXPERIENCE:

Taught in the English Department at Young harris College, 1965-1996

Served as Chairperson of the Division of Humanities, 1975-1985

Goolsby Professor of English, 1986-1996. Retired June 1996.





Bettie M. Sellers was installed in the position of Georgia Poet Laureate
by Governor Zell Miller in 1997.