Poet Rufus Skeens
Rufus Skeens doesn't simply choose to write a poem. It is more like the poem chooses him. Describing the sometimes mysterious way a poem comes into being, Skeens makes writing sound like a matter of intimate need or fortunate compulsion.
"Sometimes a line of a poem will come to me as I'm dropping off to sleep, an idea that will follow me into sleep, and that will plague me on waking until I write that line down. From there, I flesh out the poem around the initial line, like fleshing out a skeleton. And, according to my wife, I sometimes quote the poem out loud while I am asleep. I understand this can be ... um ... quite scary."
A former coal miner who lives in Bristol, Virginia, Skeens saw the publication of his first collection of poems, "Lost for Words," last fall, and the book seemed the logical conclusion to a process that began five decades ago. Growing up near the small Buchanan County town of Grundy, in the heart of Southwest Virginia's then-thriving coalfields, he was captured by the enchantment of poetry at an early age.
"Something miraculous happened to that child that was me," Skeens said. "Growing up poor, in Grundy, kind of set me up to write. Poetry is a release, almost like composing music, with words instead of notes. I have always been an outsider, the kind of person who has a favorite rock to sit on in the woods. My favorite rock, my ponder rock, was in a raspberry patch in the upper end of my grandma's garden. I'd sit on that rock for hours, watching birds and bees work for their living, and turning over ideas. Once, I brought a pen and notebook, and while watching squirrels scramble through the trees, I wrote my first poem. As you can imagine, the poem was very bad. However, something in me jelled. I loved the feel of putting words on paper."
In high school, Skeens discovered the poems of Robert Frost, whom he credits as a first and continuing influence. "The first true poem that struck me was "The Road not Taken' - the depth of Frost's words, the imagery, the way his mind taught us how to ponder, the weight of words - I wanted to learn to do that."
After high school, Skeens, like many of his classmates, went into the coal mines, where he worked primarily as a roof bolter with little time for writing, but in 1991 a severe ankle injury put an end to his mining career. He moved to Bristol with his two daughters, Tracy and Angela, and his wife, Earnestine, so that she could begin classes in social work at Virginia Intermont College. She went on to earn a master's degree from Radford. That's when he started writing again, intensely, and participated in a group of local writers who met monthly at The Arts Depot in Abingdon. Not long after, Skeens's poems began appearing in regional magazines like Appalachian Heritage, Now & Then and The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, as well as occasional publications in prestigious national journals, such as the Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has also been honored at writing competitions, including three first-place wins at the Virginia Highlands Festival, three first-place wins at Wytheville's Chautauqua contest and two first-place wins at Southwest Virginia Community College's annual Appalachian Heritage Symposium, among others.
Skeens' poems grow, without pretense, from the hills and people of Appalachia, and from his own experiences in life.
"I am definitely an Appalachian poet. To be believable, you write what you know. I know Appalachia," Skeens said. "My favorite topics are Appalachia, mining, poverty, my grandparents. I feel that the lives of coal miners, in particular, are overlooked or forgotten in today's world. The hardships of a mining life - the ruination of the mountains, the poverty, layoffs, lack of education, old injuries, black lung - need to be recognized, and accounted for by the nation as a whole."
Skeens' sympathy, and it is a well-earned sympathy, for the lives of miners shows up in poems such as "The Suicide Life," which meditates on the dangers miners have historically faced. It begins,
How to say that every day is a new death?
Ask that miner before he steps inside the drift mouth,
his willing burial. The coal anticipates
the fragile spark that is body, breath,
the carbide light --- each so easily crushed by stone,
coal's rib roll, belt roller, coal dust ignition, methane.
The danger is real and the terminology precise, but it is an acute ear for how the music of language surfaces even in the names of machinery, and long thought on the meaning of things, that shifts the description of what might be an everyday experience into poetry. But in Skeens's work, the poem is never a movement away from the ordinary. It is, rather, a deeper, more revealing penetration into the everyday reality.
So, how does one go about writing? Skeens' poem, "Writing a Good Poem," would seem to offer advice - and it does, though his advice is less lofty pronouncement and more a recommendation to focus on accurate love of the small details and always keep an ear tilted to the densities and textures of words. "Writing a Good Poem" begins
Unwatched, field mice frolic
inside the corn crib, as the barn mouser licks
October's unexpected frost from the catnip's stalks
grandma husbanded along the creek wall,
feline eyes rolling at intense cold, the mint's
addictive jolt.
Is a poet like a barn cat, as buzzed on the "addictive jolt" of language as the mouser on catnip? The poem doesn't quite say, leaving interpretation to the reader, though it does end on an image that one might read as standing for the complicated trajectory from inspiration to finished poem: "I was / that child who leapt from the barn's highest eave / with a pillow case as my parachute. Heaven."
"I have one rule I follow," Skeens explains. "I take one moment in a poem, then fill that moment with meaning. I can't write about a week in time, but I try to describe a moment with clarity and life."
Skeens's "Lost for Words" is published by James Ward Kirk Books and is available from Amazon.
He reads from his work at the Washington County Public Library in Abingdon Sunday, April 3, at 3 p.m. He is joined by Daryl Ann Beeghley, Jim Collier, Warren Harris and David Winship.
Originally from Southwest Virginia, James Owens worked on regional newspapers before earning a MFA at the University of Alabama. He divides his year between central Indiana and northern Ontario. His latest book of poems is "Mortalia," from FutureCycle Press.
Poem by Rufus Skeens .....
Black Day Rain
With thunder there is a bruised light
that settles on the ridge. Poplar and sycamore
roll their leaves over as if half drowned
by the rain. Hens squabble under the porch,
pecking at disturbed spiders and crickets
amongst broken garden tools and the ruin
of an old push mower. Even the beagle
and the barn cat have come to an impasse,
old quarrels set aside briefly to share
the dog box's dry bedding behind the concrete steps.
Only the old rooster is restless under his shelter,
giving the odd flinch and cluck at lightning strikes,
the pop and squeak of the floor boards inches
above his comb, where an old coal miner
rocks fitfully in a Quaker chair, syncing his mind
to a pint of Old Crow and the music of rain
on tin roof, even as his body battles suffocation
while doing its damndest to cough up a lung.
Printed with permission
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