It isn't every day that poets hit pay dirt. Most often they work in relative obscurity, appealing to the sensitive, literary minds around them, often reading from their poetry in small public gatherings. But Judy Jordan, a Utah poet, achieved national prestige literally overnight.
Last week in New York, she was presented with the prestigious 2000 National Book Critic Circle Award for Poetry for her powerful collection, "Carolina Ghost Woods." Her first book has already had ample recognition both locally and nationally — the 1999 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the 2000 Utah Book of the Year Award for Poetry.
Speaking to the Deseret News from her home in Salt Lake City, Jordan said, "I'm still in shock." She thought the award would go to either Ann Carson for "In the Hour of Men" or Yusef Komunyakaa for "Talking Dirty to the Gods." The latter is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
The awards are given in the manner of the film industry's Academy Awards with a lot of hype. Because she didn't expect to win, she prepared no acceptance speech. "But being a Southerner by birth, I ought to be able to tell a story. So I told about my brother, who has a poet's sensibility but not the education to understand it. I feel like a messenger for people like that."
Asked if such an award would drastically change her life, Jordan said, "There is nothing drastic about being a poet. People don't pay much attention to us."
But she does expect more attention for a while.
Jordan, who recently finished a second master's degree in fiction from the University of Utah (her first master's is from the University of Virginia in poetry), is headed to California in the fall to accept a teaching position at California State University at San Marcos. Besides poetry, she will teach classes in literature and screen-writing, and she finds that exciting.
"I don't like to get stuck in one genre. I want to write novels, too. There are characters in my head whose stories need telling. You reach a wider audience in fiction writing. One thing that will not work as a poem might work as a novel. I like having that option."
Jordan's prize-winning book is autobiographical. She grew up "in the boondocks of North Carolina, in the town of Marshfield, home town of Randy Travis." The daughter of a sharecropper, she had a rough childhood, losing her mother at the age of 7 and living among rough-mannered men. She witnessed killings and race riots and was even beaten herself because as a white girl she had associated with blacks.
Her background presented a lot of material for poetry, and she tapped that generously in "Carolina Ghost Woods."
"I reached for the points of light above these events to find the love I knew existed in the world. Going to the landscape helped."
In the title poem, Jordan has "an argument with death. Because my mother died when I was 7, and I had seen so much of death. Very early I had an awareness of mortality. I thought I had killed my mother. Everything that happens is my fault. I brought a bird into the house, and so I thought that might mean death. That's an old superstition.
"Language is the most important thing in the world — the ability to communicate without resorting to violence. But we rarely do it, because what we say is not heard by the other person. There are a lot of things going on in the poem. It's like these edges floating around. Then at the end, a bird is holding the scrap of my name in its talons. It suggests that very soon I'm going to die. My mother was 43, so I always thought 'I'm never going to make it to 43— and anyone who has been friends with me is going to die, too. It's the mundane meeting the mystical."
"Killing at the Neighbors," based on a true story, is another poem in her collection. "That woman was being abused, so she shot him in self defense, then she had to pretend to be crazy or she would have gone to jail. She went to a mental institution and then got out in a few years. My mother stood over me and said, 'We don't want her to come back to this. Scrub harder.' I could never get all that blood up, so I thought I failed my mother."
As valedictorian of her high school graduating class, Jordan got a scholarship to the University of Virginia, but the grant didn't cover costs of living. So she spent much of her time there as part of the "invisible homeless — I stayed in university buildings or stayed up all night in the deli. Sometimes, I was up all night delivering pizzas."
At Virginia, she realized the voids in her education. "I had memorized an Edgar Guest poem in high school. That was all."
Then she read on her teacher's door a poem revisiting a fairy tale, about a world without women. That was the kind of world she came from, and so she said, "I can do that. I started reading the poets the teacher recommended. It took me years and years of writing to learn how to write. This was 1982, but it was 1994 before I wrote anything that was any good. For me, poetry has to have beauty and rhythm and present the world in a slightly different light. To combine metaphor and imagery is difficult. I spent more than 100 hours writing the title poem, 'Carolina Ghost Woods.' "
A second manuscript of poetry very different from the first is soon to be published by Louisiana State University Press. It deals with Greek society, and it started with her association with a Greek cook at the University of Virginia. "I did some research on Greece. In Athens in the first year of German occupation, there were more deaths from starvation than anywhere else in the entire world."
In spite of her own rich background of material, Jordan has interests outside herself. "If someone tells me about the Greeks in the 1940s or life in Peru, my mind just starts working. I always seem to have something going on. The thing that is unusual about my background is that I survived those things to write about them as art. A lot of people are writing but haven't figured out how to make it art yet."
Although she loves to attend poetry readings or do readings herself, her mind digests them differently than most people. "I like to hear the poems in the poet's own voice, and the stories told around the poems, but I never take away anything from it, maybe because I wasn't read to as a child. Yet some people come to me in tears and quote my poems to me. If you touch one person's life in a way that's positive, then you have done something important."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com