“ So there's no money in it per se. You do it for other reasons. You do it because you must, because you want to, because there's this drive inside you to share something and to shape it. ”
— Kevin Nance
A LIFETIME OF POETRY IN SMOKE
Kevin Nance, author of "Smoke," a book of poetry from Accents Publishing. (Photo: Mark Cornelison)
By Tom Martin
Undermain
Kevin Nance is a writer, photographer and arts journalist. He grew up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, but has lived for many years in Lexington. Kevin's poems have appeared in many literary journals, including “Cumberland Poetry Review,” which awarded him the Robert Penn Warren Poetry Prize.
As an arts journalist, his work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Lexington Herald-Leader, Poets and Writers Magazine and other publications. He is co-host, along with Jay McCoy, of Kentucky Writers Roundtable, a literary interview program on RADIOLEX. And he is a contributing writer for Undermain, as well as a contributing interviewer for the WEKU program, Eastern Standard.
In an interview for Eastern Standard, we discussed Kevin's new book of poetry, “Smoke,” described by the publisher — Lexington's Accents Publishing — as “an immersive and evocative, celebratory and heartbreaking journey towards a life of authenticity, personal values and hard-earned freedom.”
Here's a transcript of our conversation featuring excerpts of Kevin sharing two of his works in his own voice.
Tom: Let's begin with some context and perspective. Tell us about growing up in North Carolina.
Kevin: I grew up in Eastern North Carolina on a tobacco farm, a small farm. And the first section of the book tells that story about growing up there, being part of the life of the farm, my relationships with my parents and other aspects of coming of age in that time and place. We didn't know at the time that we were really in the last generation of small tobacco farmers that did it the way that is described in some of my poems. We were right on the edge of automation in a big way, and all of the work that I describe in some of the poems is now done by large machines. And so it's kind of North Carolina tobacco farm meets “The Adding Machine” in a way.
Tom: I've been dying to ask you how a boy from a Carolina tobacco farm goes on to become a Duke University graduate and a fine journalist, writer and poet. How did that happen?
Kevin: Well, I got interested in poetry very early on. I discovered Walt Whitman as a teenager in high school. I was so taken with him and other poets. I mean, sometimes I look back on the stuff I was reading, things like Khalil Gibran, for example, and I wonder how in the world did I ever find my own true voice? Because I was sort of imitating those people early on. But that's how you learn. You learn by reading and digesting and figuring out what your own voice sounds like and what you want to say, and that's what I did.
Then when I went to Duke, I came under the tutelage of a wonderful faculty member and poet there named James Applewhite. I was also a student of Reynolds Price, better known as a novelist but also a wonderful poet. And they taught me a trick or two, as you say.
Tom: This collection of poetry seems to me to serve as something of a memoir since it covers the span of your life. Is that your intent?
Kevin: I think so, I think so, especially the first section. There are four sections. The first deals with my early life in North Carolina. The second deals with more or less my poor attempts at having a love life. The third section deals largely with my life as a Kentuckian, life in Lexington, things that have happened here to me in this wonderful commonwealth. And then the final section is a sort of series of meditations on aging, mortality and beyond.
Tom: Details of the moments that you've captured can be really visceral, but you do also spark the imagination. As an example, in "Gathering Tobacco," you transport us to that North Carolina tobacco field in the early morning and then under the hot sun of a long and exhausting day of grueling work of harvesting — because that's what it is. So I wonder if you could give us a reading of "Gathering Tobacco."
Kevin: Absolutely. And I'll mention that this was my first published poem. It appeared in Poet Lore Magazine in 1979.
North Carolina tobacco crop (Image: Shutterstock)
Daddy makes me work right along with the hired hands in the field. He gets big, rough, laughing boys from miles around to do the cropping. They always know I'm the know-it-all dirt farmer's kid, book smart but no common sense. Who thinks he's above all this but still has to work daylight to sundown all summer, just like they do, while his classmates in town sip Pepsi-Cola by the pool.
Daddy looks down from his seat on the tractor and gives me a look. "Don't pay them no mind." It's chilly in the early mornings, dew like ice water on the tobacco leaves. I dread touching the first leaf, always dripping wet and have to carry it with a sheaf of others under my arm, which is why I've got on an undershirt and two outer shirts and a jacket, layers I peel off one by one.
When I snap the rubbery leaves off the stalk, nasty green tobacco juice squirts out from the stems, and sometimes it catches me in the eye and burns. I'm soaked to the skin with dew and sweat and pesticide residue when the sun comes out and dries me off. Daddy waits till we throw our armfuls of leaves on the trailer, then gives it the gas and creeps up the row.
By noon we're roasting, Daddy and the rough boys and me. On sand-lugging days, early in the season, we bend down double for the biggest and lowest leaves where the rattlesnakes nest and a hot gust of our own stink drifts up from our collars and armpits. Sometimes we go white in the face and throw up bile. Daddy gives it the gas and yells, "Load it or tote it, boys," and I feel small under the sky.
When the barn's full, it's almost dark. Daddy pays the rough boys in good hard cash, not a dime left over from me. I stand there covered in black tobacco tar. He says, "Don't know what I'd do without you, son." I don't know either and smile without showing my teeth and wish he'd just go on and take the boys home so I can run to the house and scrub myself all over with Ivory soap and drink a Pepsi-Cola.
Tom: What motivated you to title this book “Smoke”? I know that there is a poem titled "Smoke."
Kevin: Yes. You know, smoke is a theme really in the book. The word keeps coming up throughout the book, both in the section that deals with my life in North Carolina but also in the subsequent sections.
I think the first meaning of it for me is, of course, that my father smoked and everybody I knew smoked. I didn't smoke actually. My older brother did, but I never took up the habit, and I thank God for that because I have two brothers, both of whom are dead of heart disease related to smoking, and my father died at 53 of heart disease related to smoking.
I was very conscious as I was growing up that my family business, so to speak, was raising a crop that had this poison in it that killed people, and it's right there on the package. The surgeon general tells you it's not safe. It's bad for you. And so my father was a fourth-generation tobacco farmer, and I think he struggled with that sense of the tradition of it for him and the pride that he had in growing this crop and the fact that he knew on some level that we were complicit in this plague that was just scouring the land. In fact, his very best friend died of lung cancer, almost certainly related to heavy tobacco use, and I remember that very well.
And so the poem that I'm going to read next, which is called "Smoke," is a kind of way of conceiving of smoke as both a physical reality and a kind of metaphor for a lot of other things, particularly those relating to passing into the next world.
Tom: All right. I've read the poem "Smoke," of course. I hear it in my own voice, but I've been looking forward to hearing it in yours.
Harvested tobacco leaves (Image: Shutterstock)