Jaki Shelton Green was one of four inductees into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has received many awards for her poetry, including becoming the first poet laureate of the Piedmont region of the state in 2009. She was born in Mebane, leaving there for brief periods to attend school and get married. She has lived in Connecticut and later traveled to many places around the globe. But North Carolina is “home,” says Green, who now lives in Hillsborough.
Green has conducted workshops and presented readings throughout the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean islands, and Central and South America. Groups such as the African American Dance Ensemble have choreographed her poetry. She is a strong voice for women writers and continues to educate and advocate on their behalf. At 62, Green has severe rheumatoid arthritis but has learned to accept and embrace the technology that permits her to continue her work.
ONC: What did being named poet laureate for the Piedmont of North Carolina mean to you?
JSG: I’ve always been attracted to nontraditional writers— writers whom I’ve worked within homeless shelters, in prisons, women on death row. I want to enhance the world of literature one person at a time. As the Piedmont poet laureate, I got a chance to roll around the area and meet with many writers. I don’t always get excited about the everydayness of poetry. People often ask me what inspires me. As a working-class writer, I don’t have the privilege of saying, “I’m going to my cabin, or beach house to write now.” Writing is as natural as breath for me. In all the other jobs I’ve had, my poet is always present for me. Poetry is everywhere. You have to listen. All of our stories are valuable and valid. I am proactive about garnering that excitement for everyone. Hear poetry everywhere. Poetry lives inside of our stories, you just have to learn to glean them out.
Do you remember when you heard your first poem?
First poem? In my mom’s womb. My mother loves books; she reads everything, and at age 96, she still reads everything. Reading poetry? In elementary school. I’ve been writing since childhood. I have always loved paper and remember getting paper as a child and still love good paper. There was a family friend who worked in the pulp mill, and he often brought me the paper. It was very precious. I remember cutting paper into strips and writing on them then putting them in mason jars and burying them. I guess I thought there was an underground tunnel, and there were people out there reading my stories. As I grew up, I continue to love fine paper. I don’t write on a computer. I write on paper, in my journals. I feel connections between the paper and pen and my thoughts. Often I get my poems from my journal. I tell children that there is nothing magical about writing poetry. I’m always writing poetry, but do I write it all down? No. I have given myself permission to not write every poem that comes to me. I can be cutting vegetables at the kitchen sink and notice something about a tree outside and think of many words to put down about it, but not everything becomes a poem.
ONC: What poets have influenced you?
JSG: Growing up in rural North Carolina was a blessing in all of its beauty and ugliness. Space and place influenced the stories I heard. There are memories of stories, told and retold, that truly direct my writing and sometimes it’s the absence of memory. We have to remember. Sometimes, I have to dig deep into my writing. I’ve been doing a lot of genealogy research and coming up with a lot of things that I know are going to be a guide for some writing. I discovered that my great-grandmother married a freed slave of Irish descent. I have been attracted to all things Irish for the past two decades. I began to wonder if writing is in my DNA. I feel Ireland is calling me. My African-American heritage calls me, too. Research has taken me down roads I didn’t expect. I love those twists and turns.
ONC: Why do you think North Carolina has such an abundance of writers and poets? Not just writers and poets, but excellent ones?
JSG: I think North Carolina is very nurturing. I think historically we have been a nurturing community. We have been very serious about the tradition of supporting the arts—writing, art, sculpture, music. In 2011, I became deathly ill, and it was the literary community that rushed to my aid. We were in dire straits, and I’m going to tell you that if weren’t for the literary community, I’m not sure where we’d be. You’ve heard of the kindness of strangers? I heard from people I’d never heard of who expressed kindness, compassion, and support. Some would send me $2 or $5 or more saying they heard I was having a rough time and they wanted to help. One day as I was going for treatments, the receptionist told me that two sessions had been paid for. It was a very powerful and humbling experience for me that I’m just so grateful for. I was sent home to die. A holistic doctor told me that it was my job to heal. Where does that happen? I don’t have the means that I could ever return or repay.
ONC: Punctuation is rare in your work. Why is that?
JSG: It’s intentional. It’s very, very intentional. When I started writing seriously in the ’70s, I was married and my husband was a very good writer. We taught in Connecticut, but I was the little “wifey” who did Mommy duty, and when the kids were napping, I would get out my typewriter and just bang the heck out of it. Well, it was just “cute” to him, and I realized early on that the woman’s voice has been disenfranchised as it had been for many, many years. I decided to be a voice, and there would be no containment, so that explains the no punctuation. When I was teaching, my students would ask why they had to learn punctuation when I didn’t use it in my work. I would tell them you have to learn the rules. You have to know the rules before you can break them. I don’t write that way (with punctuation) but I can. Several years ago, several of my students surprised me with a reading of some of my poems. It amazed me that they saw things (in poetry) that I had not. I realized I was putting it (my poetry) out there, and after that, it’s not mine anymore.
ONC: Were you a part of the Civil Rights Movement?
JSG: I was. My family indeed were, very much so. I have lots of memories of when I was young, in church on Sunday and we would stay inside the church and be covered up with coats because someone warned us there were white men with guns surrounding the church. My father put us children under the pew and covered us. I remember the fear in “that boy from Georgia is coming through town.” The whole community was involved in his visit. The women bustled around making food, straightening their homes, so “that boy” (Martin Luther King Jr.) and his people would have a safe place to stay.
I had a scholarship to a Quaker school in Pennsylvania, where we were taught nonviolence as the way to change things. When we left there, we were shocked by what was going on in Vietnam and Cambodia and here at home.
ONC: Are you disappointed by the way things are going in the world regarding race relations?
JSG: I am. I’m sad. It’s a very sorrowful time in our culture. There is a collective crisis of memory in Southern memory. I don’t really know how to enter the conversation. There’s a lot of tension in the world—not just racial, but of the earth, of people killing their children. There is an energy that is sinister in our society. We can be the good we want.
ONC: “Who will be the messenger of this land” (from “Breath of the Song”) rings very true. Did you intend it as a call to action?
JSG: I wrote that piece after being in Brazil and coming home and talking to some farmers. We are the only ones who can heal the earth; we cannot count on a knight in shining armor to save us.
ONC: What are your future plans?
JSG: Working on several things—a business to help facilitate women’s writing, workshop retreats, working on a novel for many years, co-editing a poetry anthology to be published in the spring by the Chapel Hill Press; always the unanticipated. Good thing that I’m able to do all this. It’s fun.
—
who will be the messenger of this land
by Jaki Shelton Green
who will be the messenger of this land
count its veins
speak through the veins
translate the language of water
navigate the heels of lineage
who will carry this land in parcels
paper, linen, burlap
who will weep when it bleeds
and hardens
forgets to birth itself
who will be the messenger of this land
wrapping its stories carefully
in patois of creole, irish,
gullah, twe, tuscarora
stripping its trees for tea
and pleasure
who will help this land to
remember its birthdays, baptisms
weddings, funerals, its rituals
denials, disappointments,
and sacrifices
who will be the messengers
of this land
harvesting its truths
bearing unleavened bread
burying mutilated crops beneath
its breasts
who will remember
to unbury the unborn seeds
that arrived
in captivity
shackled, folded,
bent, layered in its
bowels
we are their messengers
with singing hoes
and dancing plows
with fingers that snap
beans, arms that
raise corn, feet that
cover the dew falling from
okra, beans, tomatoes
we are these messengers
whose ears alone choose
which spices
whose eyes alone name
basil, nutmeg, fennel, ginger,
cardamom, sassafras
whose tongues alone carry
hemlock, blood root, valerian,
damiana, st. john’s wort
these roots that contain
its pleasures its languages its secrets
we are the messengers
new messengers
arriving as mutations of ourselves
we are these messengers
blue breath
red hands
singing a tree into dance
copywrite, Breath of Song, Carolina Wren Press, 2005