And your experience working on the Southern Poetry Review?

COURTESY OF SOUTHERN
POETRY REVIEW

Guy Owen founded the journal under the name Impetus in Florida at Stetson University. He moved it with him when he came to North Carolina State University to teach, renaming it Southern Poetry Review. I took a creative writing class with him in 1965. It was a fiction class but he let me write poems instead — that, incidentally, is the only creative writing class I’ve ever had. Anyway, at the end of the semester, he gave me a list of places to which I could send poems and asked me to be a reader for SPR. Later, I became an Associate Editor, and I guest-edited an issue of women’s poetry, unusual in those days. I helped found the Guy Owen Prize. Guy died young, and two of us, Thomas Walters and I, sent out letters to all the poets Guy had published and encouraged for years, a number of them well known by the time of his death. Everyone sent contributions and we raised enough to start the prize. I am very proud to have been able to help keep Guy’s name connected to the magazine he loved.

Despite the word “southern” in its name, the magazine was national in its reach. Guy did certainly encourage southern poets particularly, but work from all regions came in to the journal. I recommend to you the paperback anthology, Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review, just out this year from University of Arkansas Press.

One of your poems, “Kind of Blue,” (also a famous and influential jazz album by Miles Davis), blends nature, music, place, and language. You’ve had the good fortune to enjoy live performances of some of the greatest jazz musicians; how is it that you’ve gotten to listen to many jazz greats while living in Raleigh?

Jazz Musician Miles Davis
BY Tom Palumbo
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We live just blocks from the site of the club that was one of the best jazz clubs in the country during the seventies and the early eighties, when jazz was drying up in New York. A British physicist who also played jazz drums opened a place called “The Frog and Nightgown” that attracted most of the best-known mainstream jazz greats. I heard Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Clark Terry, Zoot Sims, Charlie Byrd, Woody Herman, Count Basie, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton, Sonny Stitt, and many more. All these players came for multiple gigs at the Frog over the few years it existed.

Because my husband is a jazz musician himself (flute) and an obsessed jazz buff, we went to the Frog often, sometimes several times a week. I actually got to know a number of those guys, had them over to our house. I’ve listened to the talk among my husband’s serious musician friends, heard them argue and detail the way jazz works, and I know something of that has influenced my own approach to poetry. For me, in fact, working on poems has a lot in common with jazz improvisation — the dialogue between the poet and his/her poem (yes, a draft can tell you things to do next) being similar to the dialogue between the player and the tune, a “striking off” each other — the play between the conscious and the unconscious, the given and the new, pattern and then abandonment and return, the poet and other voices he/she hears. I feel very much at home among jazz people. And I discover that most of my poet friends are jazz buffs. They talk to Don more than they talk to me.