Summer Poetry Pop-Up: Judith McCombs

Chief M’Comie Mor and the Kelpies

  

Kelpies are the shape-shifting water spirits of Scotland’s rivers. They take the forms of beautiful horses and hairy, water-weedy humans. Kelpies lure people out to drown them. 

   Glenshee, Perthshire, 1600s

There came a wailing at the door

That night of roaring wind.

O save my man, M’Comie Mor!

M’Comie, let me in.

The flood has swept my good man down,

Shee River runs so high.

There’s none but you can save him now,

O help or he will die.

Shee Water leaps like a wild, wild steed

There’s none but you can tame.

O leave your sleep and come with me

If M’Comie be your name.

The stars were dim, the moon was banned,

He probed the shifting mud

And waded out, his staff in hand,

To brave that raging flood.

A cry he heard, then saw a face

Rise like a thing half-drowned.

The Chief stood braced to pull it safe--

But it reared to stamp him down.

It was no man, but a kelpie-steed

Who carries off mere men.

He hurled his staff at the creature’s head

As the kelpie dove again.

Then the kelpie’s wife struck M’Comie’s side

With her flailing water-weeds--

In the pounding rain he hurled him free

While she joined her wave-born steed.

--Judith McCombs

Innisfree Poetry Journal; rpt. Clach of Clan MacThomas

Judith McCombs grew up nomadic, in a geodetic surveyor’s family. Her poems appear in Delmarva, Potomac & Saranac Reviews, Innisfree, Nimrod (Neruda Award), Poetry, Shenandoah (Graybeal-Gowen Prize); and The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New. She is active in Word WorksDC, Federal Poets; and arranges the Kensington Row Bookshop’s Poetry Readings.

Summer Solstice Splendid Wake Poetry Pop-Up

Afterwards, You Learn                                                                    

by Judith McCombs

Poetry Northwest

The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New

Library of Congress video recording

Afterwards, you learn to say

you were lucky; the last-year’s cubs

stayed safely behind her, breaking

the thickets for berries. Lucky

the wind from the darkening valley

turned cold, and your jacket was heavy,

and zipped to the neck. Lucky

you knew, too late for retreat

in that clearing of downfall and stone,

to drop and go fetal, arm

over neck, playing dead. Lucky

the backpack came off like an arm,

saving most of your arm, and kept her

busy till the grunting cubs

called her back to their feast.

Afterwards you learn to say

that the fault was yours: you were tired,

you were stubborn, making up for lost time

on that summer-growth trail through clearings

and thickets, the wind in your face,

not bothering to sing out or warn

what was there beside you, not waiting

for warnings to reach you.

But sometimes, in sleep, you go back

to that stonefall clearing, that edge

of safety where your scalp hair rises

like hackles for no reason you see,

and there is still enough time to go back

as that dark shape lifts upright

from its tangle of shadow, like a man

in a burly fur suit, peering out,

and you wake with the ghost hairs rising

like fur on your unscarred neck

and perfect right arm.

Judith McCombs grew up nomadic, in a geodetic surveyor’s family. Her poems appear in Delmarva, Potomac & Saranac Reviews, Innisfree, Nimrod (Neruda Award), Poetry, Shenandoah (Graybeal-Gowen Prize); and The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New. She is active in Word WorksDC, Federal Poets; and arranges the Kensington Row Bookshop’s Poetry Readings.

The Federal Poets Workshop: Beachhead and Bridge for DC-Metro Area Poets

by Judith McCombs

Founded in 1944, The Federal Poets are DC Metro-area’s longest-running workshop for poets—and the only one consistently open to newcomers. We meet afternoons on the third Saturday of the month, at the Metro-accessible Tenley Public Library, to exchange critiques aimed at enhancing a poem’s chances for publication. (Note: we have no current connection with the Federal Government, nor with state poetry societies.) You can read your one-page poem, with copies, at three meetings for group critique: and then be voted in for membership. (Or not, as happened once or twice.) 

Members pay annual dues ($25) that support our biannual

journal, Federal Poet, edited by Pam Blehert. Federal Poets has its own website and Facebook Page.

I have been a member since 1985, vice president since about 2005. I remember how much the Federal Poets’ welcome meant when I came to the area, uprooted from my long-term Michigan writers’ workshop and college teaching. I’ve stayed with Federal Poets to give back, to enjoy long-term and newer poet friends—and because the critiques and audience I get are good for my poems.

Craig Reynolds, a black gay activist poet, superb m.c. and organizer, was our president and editor till 1988; Craig arranged for us to read at Ford Theatre and Old Post Office Pavilion—the latter with Rod Jellema and Myra Sklarew as honorary guests (tribute Federal Poet Spring 1995). Frank Goodwyn, a novelist, memoirist, retired U. MD Spanish professor—and a cowboy poet—became president in 1989; followed by Nancy Allinson in 1992 as president, editor, and readings organizer; followed by Don Illich as president and readings organizer since September 2012.

About one-third of our diverse members are involved in other poetry venues: as GWU’s Jenny McKean Moore Scholars; Word Works DC editors and volunteers; Writer’s Center workshop leaders and participants (Miles David Moore and I have Words Works books, and have taught for the Center), etc. At least five workshops and two reading series come out of Federal Poets. Bob Haynes founded a workshop and Lip Service little magazine c. 1986. Ingeborg Carsten-Miller, a bilingual German poet, founded the Fairland Library Literary Salon in 2001. Jean Lehman had an Alexandria workshop and readings. Ninie Syrakin’s D.C. House of Poetry may predate her Federal Poet membership. Ann Rayburn and Pamela Passerata created new, smaller workshops. Miles David Moore hosts Arlington’s Iota Poetry Series 1994-; I arrange the Kensington Row Bookshop Poetry Series 2003-.

The Washington Post November 14, 2008 Weekend “Prime Time” featured Federal Poets, as did their January 15, 2012 Sunday Magazine cover story. 

Slanting, Scattering, Squeezing Rhymes—and Historical Sequences

written by Judith McCombs

“Are you a formalist now?” asked my Writer’s Center boss, the poet Sunil Freeman, when he saw my "Slanting, Scattering, Squeezing Rhymes" workshop title.

“Semi-formalist,” I said.

“What’s that?"

“Sort of dressy casual,” I said. And so it is.

I came to rhyme early, middle and late. Early, as so many kids do, via nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, my young mother singing rhyming scat syllables to me. Then came Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses; and the child’s book of fishing verses that her tall brother, who was School Superintendent of Westermoreland, Kansas, gave his six- or seven-year old niece. Uncle Floyd’s gift led to this early perfect-rhyme couplet: “The short, stately grapevines stand in [something] rows / But where they are marching, nobody knows.” And to “Gibson Hanky George Mechanic, Turton Ahla-antic,” the forced-rhyme names of the summer lightkeepers on my father’s U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey Party, whose vehicles followed behind ours as we went from place to place the summer that I was 6 ½.

Midway, as a college student at Ohio Wesleyan and Univ. Chicago, I tried to imitate Robert Frost’s rhymes & Shakespeare’s sonnets, won poetry and fiction prizes—and wrote my first published poem, in Fiddlehead! That followed W. D. Snodgrass’s visit to Chicago’s only creative writing workshop; he had recently won the Pulitzer for Heart’s Needle, despite his Iowa friends’ warnings that end rhymes were passé, dead & gone.

Later, in Detroit, Snodgrass—a master of rhyme and poetic form—had each of us in his Wayne State University workshop write one iambic pentameter line for a round-robin poem in class; he then pointed out that mine had way too many syllables—15 instead of 10. I’d automatically crammed my line with anapaests (short-short-long feet, as in “of the day”) not iambs (short-long, “of day”). Everyone knew English was basically an iambic language—but I’d gone with the older rhythms of the King James Bible, which is chock full of anapaests—and happened to be the most powerful language I’d ever heard, in church or anywhere.

Many have been taught that anapaests are for light, rollicking verse. But the King James Psalm imprinted most deeply in my mind and memory was crammed with anapaests: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me . . . .” The King James translation was made by a committee of 17 (!), who would say lines aloud to hear which version sounded best. The old border ballads, created by illiterate Anonymous, used anapaests freely and seriously. Coleridge followed their example in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,/ Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”)

Few poems in my first three poetry books are end-rhymed. Most have four strong beats,  held together by a net of internal slant-rhymes. Their form owes more to the older, out-loud traditions than do most poems written nowadays. Perhaps more to the right-brain music of remembered, echoing sound. Bit by bit, now and then, I was edging and leapfrogging away from free verse—and getting lost in time, while searching rhymes.

English is poor in rhymes, compared to Italian or Spanish—if by rhyme we mean only perfect rhyme. But English has a huge vocabulary—borrowed, pieced, stolen, invented, from many languages—and its slant rhymes are multitudinous. Yeats snuck slant rhymes in. Dickinson used them. So did the old ballads: and from them I learned to hear which were stronger (feet, keep); which good enough (feet, fight); which weak indeed (feet, fraught).

While belatedly moving back into slant rhymes, I was reading historical fiction, which, along with non-fiction social history, was gaining ground. Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain I read more than five times; Alice Munro’s “Wilderness Station” and View from Castle Rock even more times, for teaching and articles; John Prebble’s Scots social histories showed ways to re-imagine lost lives. History was full of stories, conflicting and contradicting; as tangled and fascinating as memories, headlines, myths and lore.

After Roots, family histories and social histories, of ordinary, non-prominent people, proliferated. Why? the Web & Ancestry.com spread family trees far and wide; people—mostly older people—went to Ellis Island, the National Archives, historical societies, clan societies, Family Research Centers. This had something to do with an aging but still alive and functioning generation; something to do with wanting a simpler, more understandable time; something, as Munro suggests, of a failure to imagine the lives of our descendants. Or of wistful thinking that somehow we, or they, may still survive, more simply, when our invulnerable technology implodes.

Lately I found myself writing family and clan narrative sequences, mostly in simple ballad or couplet form. The first sequence traced my father’s father, an adventurous farmer-carpenter who left home very early, going four states West when he was about five, to find a lifelong, loving family. The rhymes for him are mostly slant; perfect seemed too fancy. (That sequence won the Maryland State Arts Council’s one highest Individual Poetry Award in 2009.)

Now I’m writing slant-rhymed couplets in the voice of a real 1600s Scots sorcerer, one Patrick McKommie, who lived apart from my small, dispersed Highlands clan. Patrick was the one folk healer who the Kirk could not excommunicate for sorcery—as they did women and a few men—because the Presbitrie told Patrick’s minister he must first seek Bishop’s advice—but for decades no Bishop would answer. Patrick would have to be a maker—and a magnet--of stories. I’m also writing slant-and-perfectly rhymed ballads of the history and folklore of Patrick’s Chief, M’Comie Mor. (www.innisfreepoetry.org; and www.shenandoahliterary.org 62:2 (Graybeal-Gowen Prize 2012) and 62:3)

Rhymes—and voices--do come more easily now—or is it only that I go more readily to the places where they are?

http://www.writer.org/judithmccombs