Poet Michelle Castleberry, Spoken Word Participant, Celebrates Book of Her Poetry

There will be a community celebration on Saturday, from 6 to 7:30pm, at the Firehall Building on Prince Avenue for Michelle Castleberry's first book of poetry, Dissecting the Angel. There will be music, food and fellowship, and everyone is invited to attend.

Besides being a poet, Castleberry is a sometime saxophonist, and clinic social worker. Her poems, rich with imagery from her childhood among the tomato fields and timber lanes of southeastern Arkansas, echo the rhythm of hymns and blues.

Castleberry’s work has appeared in Umbrella, Bellemeade Books, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Poemeleon, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia, and is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review. 
She is most proud of her involvement in the Athens, Georgia, community of Word of Mouth, a monthly open poetry reading. Her work, in text and audio form, and
that of many of her favorite poets, can be found here.

What follows is a short Question and Answer session. 
.
Is place an important factor in your poetry? do you think it is in everyone's poetry?

MC: Place, specifically southeast Arkansas, colors my work even when it is not featured, if only by its accent. It's funny that place gets noticed so much with writers from the south, yet so many well-known poets write of big urban centers without that becoming a defining factor of their work. Some writers get the Hudson and maple trees, I got ponds and kudzu. So be it.

When did you begin writing poetry? Did you first try your hand at fiction or reporting? I have one poem that survives from my earliest attempts from around second grade. It was awful, like all first poems (and many subsequent first drafts and abandoned poems). Writing was always enjoyable,or at least compulsive. When I worked weekend shifts at a local shelter, my favorite part of the job was writing the log of each day's events. Looking back, maybe I just needed an excuse to write.

Who are your favorite poets? Or your favorite poems? Can you say what you find compelling in each?
C.D. Wright is a poet I always circle back to read because she mixes high and low language. She uses idioms so beautifully (i.e. "The jukebox / in the din calls the man a blanketyblankblank." from Deepstep Come Shining.) Kevin Young for his music and brevity. Judith Cofer for passion transmuted through craft. There are so many! Fortunately some of my favorite poets are local, too. The late Aralee Strange not only created an incredible open poetry reading, her poems were crystalline; every word essential. Alx Johns, who leads the poetry reading Aralee started, writes some of the most intelligent and funny work I have ever read.

Centuries ago, poetry was a way to keep a community history or community legends alive. What’s the role of poetry today?
The fact that poetry is outside (for the greatest part) the ken of the marketplace, it is free to take on many other roles: soapbox, prophecy, conscience, salve, entertainment. It can also be as beautifully pointless as a wooden craft piece I saw in the Ozarks--a finely built wooden box with a handle that turned two little cars that intersected but never touched. They called it a do-nothing and it was marvelous. For me, it has provided a great community gathered around something larger than its members, similar to what church means to many.

More people make a living catching butterflies than writing poetry. Does what you do to put grits and gravy on the table influence your poetry? Can you give specific examples?                    
I may have to steal part of this question for a poem! I earn my salt for the gravy by my work as a clinical social worker. That work and the act of writing both require an attention to words, how they are used, which ones are omitted. A fellow writer once called my work "empathetic and humanistic" which are good traits for a social worker, too.

Did your poetry change as you started to participate in the Spoken Word sessions downtown? Can you say how? Is your poetry better when read aloud?  
Knowing I have a room full of sharp readers and listeners pushes me to raise my game each month. It is a supportive community at Word of Mouth, but seeing others pull on the reigns makes me want to, too. Funny, I hadn't thought of writing a poem that I wouldn't want to sound good read aloud. A poem read well by its writer can be an electric thing. Even folks who think they dislike poetry should go hear poetry read. The voice can change their mind.