E.C. Joshua Poteat

Last summer I spent two weeks taking my aunt and uncle to see tourist sights around Denver and Colorado. As I listened to Joshua Poteat’s poetic readings, I was reminded of my summer adventure. What came to mind was the way my aunt and uncle asked questions, described what they were seeing and the language they used. It took a few days to become acquainted with the Irish brogue yet, it took a little longer to get acquainted with the way they described local scenes that I take for granted. Poetry is not the language of mathematics or even our common every day practical usage. It is more like the language of love and humor. When my family described Mountain peaks or a new food experience there was passion, and excitement in the descriptions. They made connections to items in their personal Irish experiences. Listening to Mr. Poteat I realized and heard the same type of passion, excitement of life and connections to personal experiences of growing up in North Carolina and around the Hampstead marshes.

Poetry is communication embedded in one’s character as well as in culture and our language. He was a person capable of disclosing through his words a way to enter this world and explore the creatures that inhabit it. His readings and talk achieved this with a relaxed attitude and good sense of humor. His humor evoked surprise and relaxation in the listener to provide insight into his poetic stories. He allowed us to see objects that are otherwise taken for granted and placed them within a new context and perspective.

It was clear in Mr. Poteat’s delivery that poetry is a revelation of another’s soul because love always reveals a lovers depth and breath. Plato tells in his story that the god Zeus split the approaching Beings who were about to attack Mount Olympus. Fierce creatures with two heads, four hands, and four feet and in splitting them down the middle he slows them down. When Zeus finished the confused creatures were left with one head, two hands and two feet as humans beings are today. Ever since, Plato believed, we seek that other half of our being and find it when we become attached, or as we call it today finding our soul mate. Poetry is like a viaduct by which one is offered a glimpse into another’s soul or we simply discover that soul

Two poems in his Ornithologies had an impact upon my reading of them and they responded to my interest in the poet. The first was “The Stigmata rather than a Punch on the Nose,” p. 73-75. It referred to his Father and the sorry young kids that called him “Little Bo Peep” as he stated they did not understand that his father was a “bonnet-headed shepherdness” because he was proud of the name Poteat. They had a great pride in who they were (the Poteat’s) and in growing up “furiously defending his name.” These childhood memories now embellished by his attachment to nature became verbal paint strokes left as an echo in his mind. In the protection of their name, he now was a protector of nature and animals. He learned from his father that “Our ruins follow us” or the past is with us in who we are and what we do. At the end, there is only the pig and a question “You don’t know him at all.” The mystery in Joshua Poteat was not only his father but also his family and the history where he grew up in North Carolina. In Joshua’s reflection of his father, he sees mystery of who he really was and his task to punctuate this personal history within a symphony of nature and its rhythms.

A second poem stood out in his collection on the person of Mr. Poteat himself, called a “Self-Portrait as the Autumn I have Lost.” This poem was not written to defend a name but to show a devilment in fun continued by the poet as part of his family history. He derailed a train and recalled in his poem how easy it was. Now, however, he put his secret into words, “There I said it, it wasn’t much to think about.” His guilt appeased by the power to place his experience within the structure of language. As a young kid, he lived an excitement where odd things happened just as they did with his father. It was painful but he was responsible if only for the pigs he derailed on that train and especially seeing their “Perfect white feet rising in the dusk.”

Listening to Mr. Poteat evoked a curiosity in me about who the person Joshua Poteat was and especially how we reveal our soul in words. It reminded me of how rich profiles hidden in layers of rock reveal to geologist great stories of nature and history. It is true also for the poet as he is a geologist of the imagination who digs up his family history and the stories of North Carolina hidden in layers of imagination. His imagination integrated with the rich experiences of his youth, his love of nature, birds, and even pigs all transformed through his language. His explosive uses of pregnant metaphors create new ways of looking at a world that he came from just as a seed shoots from its soil. A world that gave him a sense of pride in place and family.