When Cathy Smith Bowers was installed as North Carolina's new poet laureate this month, she didn't realize that she was getting two new job titles - one was the laureateship and the other was juggler.
Bowers teaches at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., at Queens University of Charlotte's low-residency master of fine arts program, and at the Great Smokies Writing Program for UNC Asheville. In addition, she had already agreed to a reading in Ohio, where she got snowed in, and to a visiting artist stint at Porter-Gaud, a private school in Charleston, S.C.
"I'm determined to meet all the obligations, but right now I've got a lot of things to juggle," Bowers said from her home in Tryon, southeast of Asheville.
Bowers succeeds fellow Western North Carolina resident Kathryn Stripling Byer to become the state's sixth poet laureate. Bowers says she plans to continue projects Byer started, including the blog at the N.C. Arts Council's Web site. She also plans to start a radio program, "Laureate's Hour," that will air on community radio station Asheville FM and also be available online ( ashevillefm.org). The program will showcase interviews and readings by the state's poets, with the first show featuring Bowers talking about the job of laureate, and poetry in general.
One of the highest compliments a reader can pay a poet is to seek out more work after encountering a single poem in a literary journal. That was my experience with Bowers' work.
Many years ago, I read her poem "Thunder" in a magazine. I don't recall the magazine now, but I do remember thinking, "I've got to find more of this work." When I found that poem collected in her first book, "The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas," it was an immediate purchase for me.
The poem describes a speaker whose husband is away on a business trip. He calls home and hears in the background a brewing thunderstorm. The wife takes the phone outside so he can hear the homesick sound better.
They don't have that here, he says
as if he were speaking of grits or Dixie Beer
or a woman who would stand in a storm
holding the receiver to the sky.
A beautiful evocation of love, the book won Texas Tech University Press' First Book Competition. Of it judge Walter McDonald wrote: "Here is a poetry of terrible beauty which, taken together, makes peace with past demons - not with a sigh or flaccid acceptance, but fiercely, with no easy forgiveness, forged after long hammering in the heart's darkest fires - that struggle we call love."
That's still true of Bowers' work, which has gotten stronger and even more powerful in the subsequent three books, "Traveling in Time of Danger," "A Book of Minutes" and "The Candle I Hold Up to See You."
Some of Bowers' strongest work concerns the death of her younger brother from AIDS. And while her subject matter may be difficult, she finds redemption in it as well.
"I write to bring order out of chaos," she says. "I feel the subjects I write about are very painful. I work through that pain when I'm working on a poem. It gives me power over it."
In addition to hard-won knowledge, Bowers has a fine wit, and I'm sure she will bring both qualities to the job of poet laureate. The state's poets and poetry readers are in good hands.
Michael Chitwood's new book of poetry, "Clamor," will be published this year. He teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill.
