Back to the Beginning

 Judith Waller Carroll


 


An Emerging Poet at the age of 65

Judith Waller Carroll

I have always loved to write.  I wrote poems and humorous pieces in grade school and high school. In college, I majored in English and chose a career in Public Relations, which meant lots of press releases as well as publishing op- ed pieces and occasional articles in local papers, house journals and magazines. 

I took a few creative writing classes in the evening when I was in my 30s and formed a writing group with four other women from one of the classes. We met once a month in each other’s homes and wrote poetry, short stories, and memoir pieces. It was fun but I didn’t try to publish and we eventually disbanded due to our busy work schedules and expanding families. 

When my husband and I retired to Hot Springs Village, a beautiful, peaceful community in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, I started writing poetry again. By chance, I heard about a reading in a nearby college campus by Andrea Hollander, a poet I had discovered through Billy Collins’ site, Poetry 180, a project he started when he was US Poet Laureate. 

The reading was wonderful and afterwards I asked Andrea if she did private mentorships—and she did! So for about six or eight weeks, we conversed weekly by phone and email (this was pre-Zoom). After I’d compiled an inventory of about 10 or 12 poems, she encouraged me to start sending them to literary journals. 

The first time I submitted I got an acceptance. The poem was “Jackson Hole, 1962,” and the  journal was Stone’s Throw Magazine published online by Montana State University, Billings, where I had studied as an undergraduate decades before when it was called Eastern Montana College of Education.  Of course, I mentioned that in the cover letter, which may have had something to do with my success. As I soon discovered, acceptances didn’t always come that easy!

My next publication was “Leaving Montana” in Umbrella, also an online journal, and the same poem also won the 2010 Carducci Poetry Prize from Tallahassee Writers Association. I was also awarded second place for another poem I submitted, “Awaiting Your Birth.” Both poems were printed in their journal, Seven Hills Review, my first print publication. I was thrilled by the award and it gave me encouragement to keep submitting. 

As I got a few more publications under my belt, I sent a manuscript to Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Chapbook contest and was offered publication of my first chapbook, Walking in Early September. 

Here are a few of my earliest published poems. 

Jackson Hole, Summer 1962
The Saturday night rodeo was all they could talk about
as they worked beside us, waiting on tables, 
cleaning motel rooms. On holiday from Vassar, 
Bryn Mawr, Duke, they tried on our lives 
as lightly as a turquoise bracelet or a pair of boots. 

Week after week in their skin-tight jeans 
they’d play the dusty crowd like a slide guitar.  
They’d sashay past sizzling hamburgers, 
past beer and Nehi, horse tails and flies, 
sidle up to a cluster of cowboys leaning on a fence, 
pull out their long, filtered cigarettes, wait 
for the lighters drawn fast as six shooters.
¬¬¬¬
We scanned the bleachers 
for college boys posing as ranch hands
or even the dangerous East Coast businessmen
who came every summer to run the Snake River, 
their perfect white teeth flashing like beacons,
their pedigrees and old money 
drawing us in like an undertow.

Stone’s Throw Magazine, 2009

Awaiting Your Birth

As you shifted and swam 
beneath my billowing dress,
your big sister caught a salamander, 
its slippery body sliding 
through her fingers into the glass dish.
She tried hard to find the perfect balance 
of water and rocks, but gradually
its spirit floated away from its skin, 
even as you were about to plant 
your water-logged feet 
firmly in time.  

Seven Hills Review, 2nd place winner 2010 Tallahassee Writers Association Poetry Contest

Walking in Early September
For Jerry

Yesterday’s grassy smell of summer
has turned into a faint hint
of dry leaves. Soon the branches will blaze 
with color, then turn bare.

Those of us who walk this trail
speak of death as casually 
as young people talk of music.

This morning I learned 
the man I nearly married died of cancer.  
His widow is printing his poems.  
All around us loss and coping. 

The squirrels gather acorns.  
There is no wisdom 
from the silent owls. 
There is only wind 
breathing through the trees.

From Walking in Early September, Finishing Line Press 2012 


Songs about Angels
 
Once inside your head, they snowball.
 
Pretty Little Angel Eyes with its oo-oos
and choreographed dance steps
morphs into Earth Angel, and you’re barely
past Will you be mine, before you’re humming
Teen Angel, a song you loathed even in 1960
when girls you knew spent hours at the jukebox,
hankies wadded in their fists.
 
You much preferred Angel Baby, my angel baby,
with Rosie’s high voice and the sultry sax
bringing the gym lights down to dim,
Kenny Johnson’s breath on the top of your head,
your body tossing coins between Devil or Angel.
 
Music in the Air Anthology, Outrider Press 2013


Shawnee, Oklahoma, July 13, 1907
 
This must have been what it was like:
the evening warm and full of possibility,
a few flickers of stars in the shadowy sky,
 
my grandmother, beautiful and barely twenty-one,
boarding the street car to the station,
my grandfather following at a discreet distance
 
and already the presses starting to roll:
School Superintendent Elopes with Wife’s Sister
Leaves behind six children
 
while on the train to Denver, heads together,
they are inventing their own version of history,
the past evaporating behind them like steam. 
 
River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-First Century, Blue Light Press 2015