Poetry haters and sympathizers alike can agree that poetry somewhat resembles avian influenza: to the former, it’s an aberrant plague to be avoided at any cost; while the latter notice it cropping up in the most unexpected places. My native North Carolina hasn’t exactly been regarded as a poetry hotspot since the heady days of Black Mountain College, and those days seem impossibly distant. I once gave a reading at the Black Mountain Museum in Asheville and discovered that all that remains of the place is a broken sign.

I wouldn’t be so brash as to compare my own, modern NC poetry environment to those halcyon days. But there is unquestionably Something Up in North Carolina poetry. (Which is not to say nothing’s happened between the demise of Black Mountain and now, but at age 28, I’m still allowed to be historically myopic; I’ll pay for it in my 30’s.) Maybe it started with the first Carrboro Poetry Festival in 2005 (organized by Patrick Herron, who, at the time, was the poet laureate of Carrboro), which featured such out-of-town luminaries as Rod Smith, Linh Dinh, Christian Bök, and Lee Ann Brown alongside a host of local talent, and pretty much single-handedly put Carrboro on the poetry map.

But probably it started with the formation of the Lucifer Poetics Group (of which I’m a member) shortly prior, which brought together the diverse NC poets working under the ambiguous “post-avant” banner. Tastemaker Ron Silliman, who came to read for us as part of the currently dormant but once-formidable Desert City reading series (helmed by Lucifer Poetics founder Ken Rumble), blogged that we were “very possibly the liveliest poetry community not integrally a part of a major metro in the U.S.” There’s plenty of NC poetry beyond Lucipo––Andrea Selch’s Carolina Wren Press, for instance, has published Lucipo people and participated in Lucipo events, but predates and operates independently of Lucipo; its contribution to NC poetry cannot be overstated. Ditto for the Lucipo-affiliated but staunchly independent minor american reading series.

(I’m tiptoeing and qualifying so carefully because to attempt any definitive survey of a given poetry scene is to piss off a lot of people, since poets are understandably starved for attention and easy to accidentally slight. Here’s hoping that an up-front acknowledgement of my non-definitive, Lucipo-biased perspective will render my ellipses inoffensive. This isn’t really a state-of-NC-poetry article anyway; I’m just getting carried away with my set-up.)