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Poetry in restoration
Posted on Sunday, September 19, 2004
On the top of a Winslow mountain
live a woman and her wolf.
The woman, Susan Powell, is a poet. She is independent, earthy and capable, with blond hair, a low voice and a fondness for cowboy boots. The wolf, a hybrid gray named Idgie, is getting older. Her hips have begun to bother her, but she remains as protective of her mistress as she has been for the nearly 12 years they’ve been together. They live in a log house that dates back to Civil War days. Situated on 16 acres, it is surrounded by woods and a ravine on one side that drops 610 feet to a spring. A silver fox and 17 deer are their closest neighbors. Powell found the house a few years ago while randomly driving dirt roads in search of a place to settle in Northwest Arkansas. She had spent many years in the area before moving to Hot Springs in 1992. Having found that city "too hot and too flat," she wanted to come home.
She had to have a log house — it was all she’d wanted since childhood. And despite the gray siding that was tacked on at some point in the house’s history, Powell knew it was a log structure immediately: It is long and narrow with a steep roof, and it leans a bit on one end.
She bought it and moved in with Idgie over Christmas in 2001. The pair would like to just stay on their mountain — Idgie to relax, and Powell to write and pursue her other passion, peeling back the years and extra layers from her home to reveal its beauty and charm. Instead, they climb into the car and make the trek to Russellville, where Powell teaches literature and creative writing at Arkansas Tech University. She loves to teach, and she loves working with students, but the constant driving gets tiresome. With luck, she won’t have to do it much longer. Powell has plans. Writer at work Clad in jeans, a flannel shirt and cowboy boots, the poet-teacher strolled across the field from her house to another building on her land, the 1843 Rudy schoolhouse.
She purchased the log schoolhouse in 1999 for $500 and later hauled it piece by piece to her mountain. During the next few years, she rebuilt it using as much of the original material as she could salvage. Originally intended as a library, the building has become a guest house where Powell’s father, a retired state police officer who lives in Ozark, often spends weekends.
It could also become the first cabin in Powell’s future writers’ colony. She has her eye on two more cabins around the area and has been in negotiations for one of them for quite some time. If all goes according to plan, she will bring them home, refurbish them and allow students to spend summers there to concentrate on writing.
But those plans are longrange. For now, Powell is concentrating on reviving her writing workshops, which she last taught in the late 1990s.
Dubbed Arkansas Writers at Work, the workshops will begin this fall and consist of three-hour weekly meetings for six weeks. Each session will include a meal. "I’m a big fan of the ‘breaking of bread’ approach," Powell said. "It fosters a sense of security among the students and helps make them closer and calmer."
Powell is an accomplished writer. She has published four books of poetry and has been featured in magazines across the country, including Redbook and Poet’s Market. She was named among the 5,000 Personalities of the World in 1993, Who’s Who of American Women from 1991-1998 and Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers in 1996. And her classes at colleges across Arkansas — particularly the former North Arkansas Community College in Rogers, where she taught from 1981 to 1990 — have been filled consistently to capacity.
Powell says she employs a casual, laidback teaching style in her workshops that meets novice writers on their own level. Students bring copies of their work to be critiqued and edited. Only positive suggestions are allowed, and "absolutely no body slamming," she said.
Students may bring any form of writing: nonfiction, short stories, chapters from novels or poetry — Powell’s specialty. ‘Poems happen to me’ "To be a good poet,
you have to live
like a poet," Powell explained. "It’s kind of an on-the-edge lifestyle. … I like to experience everything I possibly can, from sky diving to spelunking in a cave." But now, at 50, her approach to her life is quite different than it once was. As a teenager, Powell entered and won beauty pageants. She did some modeling in her hometown of Danville and in Little Rock, and was a model for Seventeen magazine for a summer — an experience she describes as "a little like being a mule." " Modeling was not my cup of tea, "she said." One day I realized I didn’t want to waste my youth on something physical instead of mental. "Powell attended Arkansas State University on a music scholarship, but she soon transferred to Arkansas Tech to serve as a guinea pig in the school’s new bachelor of fine arts degree program. It was during those years in Russellville that she published her first poetry anthology," Sunshine and Shadows" — a book she now reads with amusement, if not embarrassment, she said.
She also met two of her earliest mentors during that time: Francis Gwaltney, a faculty writer at Tech, and Miller Williams, a well-known Fayetteville poet and University of Arkansas professor. "Miller was my first poetry mentor," Powell said. "I remain enamored of him and his work to this day."
Powell graduated from Tech in December 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in English. A sixthgeneration Arkansan, she wanted to stay in the state and teach at the college level. At the time, Arkansas schools were awarding jobs to those with out-ofstate degrees, so she began searching elsewhere for a creative writing graduate program.
She looked at the University of Iowa and found the waiting list too long. But the No. 2 program in the country, the University of Arizona, had an opening. She didn’t know it until she got to Tucson, but the position had been vacated by a student who failed to pass his manuscript review two years into the program. She would be entering the program with 20 fiction writers and 19 other poets who had begun two years prior. "I didn’t know what I was getting into," Powell said.
Despite the fact that she was a quiet student who sat in the back of lecture halls and "tried to be invisible," Powell was called one afternoon into the office of department head Robert Downs, an American Book Award winner and "the man on top of the writing scene," she said. Downs asked her to apply for a teaching assistantship. "All my friends had applied because they wanted to be teachers and needed the experience," she said. "I just wanted to wander in the desert and write poetry. I was naive and idealistic."
Powell was hesitant, but Downs was persistent. He told her to give the position a shot for one week, and if she hadn’t found her niche, he’d give the chance to another student.
Much to her surprise, things clicked. After earning her master of fine arts degree in 1980, Powell stayed on as a lecturer and assistant professor at Arizona.
Then, in 1981, she got the news that her grandmother and father were diagnosed with cancer within weeks of each other. Her mother needed her help in Danville to run the family’s feed mill. Powell moved to Fayetteville and worked in the mill for about a year while working on another book. She continued to travel back and forth between Arizona and Arkansas to do poetry readings in Tucson. "I wasn’t ready to give up my life there," she said. "I was hoping everyone would get well and I could go back."
All the traveling and uncertainty fueled her writing, and at a reading in Arizona, a publisher in the audience approached her about putting out her next book. The result was "Any Act of Leaving," which was published in 1983.
Powell’s third book, 1988 ’s "Sudden Departures," was penned while she lived in a beach house in Maine. Her fourth and final published work to date, "Women Who Paint Tall Houses," came out in 1996. It, too, was autobiographical, inspired by her experiences with the house painting business she ran in Rogers in the 1980s and early ’ 90s. "All of my poems are occasional poems," Powell said. "They’re about events, and they’re very personal. I’m not writing for an audience. … I can’t whip out a poem every day. Poems happen to me. I don’t pursue them."
Powell likens her philosophy on writing to that of Flannery O’Connor. "It doesn’t matter how much you write," she said. "It matters how good it is. I’d rather have 10 awesome poems than 20 books of forced poetry. … I want to be recognized as a fine poet. I don’t care if it’s after I’m dead. That suits me." Poetry in cedar From "Seventeen Years Later" in "Women Who Paint Tall Houses": She wanted them to walk barefoot in the dark on those floors, feel the dips her friend had purposely sanded in to create the illusion of age. The way old houses show their wear, the furrows of feet traveling the same paths for a lifetime, out of necessity or habit. There’s always a rut in front of the kitchen sink, a trail to the bathroom a blind man could follow.
... She recognized the younger woman’s life, her poetry a product now of cedar, stone, and glass. She understood those gestures turned active off the page, making the whole house a poem.
Powell has completed two house-poems. Her first was a cabin near Beaver Lake in Rogers; her second was a 1939 log house in Hot Springs, where she lived while teaching at Garland County Community College. She christened the house Talley-Ho Ranch —" I added the ‘e’ to make it feminine, "she said.
Coincidentally, her current undertaking, the log house where she lives in Winslow, borders the former Talley Homestead. Powell speculates it might have served as a lookout during the Civil War because of its mountaintop location and the lack of nearby houses.
It is in her nature to learn and preserve the history of the log homes she restores. This seems to be a family trait, as her uncle, Norman Powell, is a well-known historian in Ozark who has an impressive collection of historical items from the area, some of which are housed in the Ozark Area Depot Museum.
In researching her home, Powell learned that the land belonged to the Bishop family from the 1930s through the 1990s, when the house was sold because its matriarch’s health was failing and she could no longer live alone. A few Bishops remain in the area, she said.
Renovations are in their early stages, and a quick walkthrough of the house reveals that Powell has her work cut out for her.
On the right side, where the building leans, she has propped it up with stakes that extend through the walls into the ground. Upstairs, dirty gray carpet covers an uneven floor, and some of the walls are a garish greenish-turquoise. On the walls where the logs are exposed, century-old newspaper still clings to the niches to help keep long-ago inhabitants warm.
One of the first problems Powell addressed upon purchasing the house was the lack of a bathtub in the only bathroom.
" It only had a shower, "Powell said," and there’s just something about a bath. "
Her solution? The" fancy outhouse. "
The outhouse, which contains a bathtub, sink and commode, is positioned just to the side of the main house and will eventually connect to it via a deck. It has a ceiling of honey pine, and its walls and floor are made of fragrant cedar.
Powell, who taught herself the craft of woodworking through reading books and lots of practice, has all her wood specially milled in Havana, Ark. A friend, fellow woodworker Sherry Carpenter, helped Powell construct the outhouse floor, which features whittled moons and other designs set into the cedar.
" We sealed the walls with a mixture of resin, fruit pectin and vegetable juices to help smooth it and retain the color — cedar tends to fade, "Powell explained.
Another early project was the addition of a corner office off the living area of the house. Again Powell had help, this time from West Fork builder Donovan Hash.
From outside, the office provides a glimpse into the house’s future, as it is the only part not covered with the gray siding.
" It’s a pet peeve [of mine] to see vinyl siding on a log house, "Powell said.
As for the interior, Powell intends to knock out some downstairs walls to create an uninterrupted circular path through all the rooms.
" I want to make it a walkthrough house, "she explained." I walk around while I’m writing and talk to myself. I talk out the poems. "
She will do all her own tiling, floors, ceilings and cabinets. She also builds her own wooden tables and bookshelves.
Hash will again be on hand to help Powell refurbish the stairway, which is rickety and impossibly narrow. The finished version will be much wider with about three landings to give Idgie places to stop and rest her hips.
Other plans for the house include an outdoor, screenedin kitchen and a mezzanine above the entryway, which will feature stained-glass windows. Powell hopes to have the renovations completed by next summer.
When she is finished with her log houses, they are completed poems. In that respect, Powell works on them as a form of self-_expression. But there is another reason she searches out log structures.
" I’m on a quest to keep people from tearing them down, "she said." I want them to see the value in them. This is an Arkansas landmark home. It needs to be preserved and honored. "
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