Poem of the Week | August 04, 2014

This week we offer another poem from our new summer issue, 37.2. Valerie Nieman’s second poetry collection, Hotel Worthy, will be published in spring 2015. A 2013-2014 North Carolina poetry fellow, her work has appeared in Poetry, New Letters, Blackbird, and many other journals as well as several anthologies. Her third novel, Blood Clay, was the 2012 winner of the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Prize. Nieman graduated from West Virginia University and received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. A former newspaper reporter and editor, she teaches creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University and serves as poetry editor of Prime Number magazine.
 
Author’s note:

The girl show or “hootchie-kootchie” of the carnival midway featured pretty female dancers, either costumed or in varying degrees of undress. Shows might be themed, including a “jig show” in the era of segregation. This poem from my current work-in-progress, The Leopard Lady Speaks: A Novel in Verse, is told by Hagar, a biracial orphan from Kentucky, as she joins a traveling carnival in the late 1940s after being abandoned by her lover in Pennsylvania. The shape notes, the only music allowed in the home where she was raised, refers to harmony singing based on musical notation using different shapes for the note heads. It is also called “Sacred Harp” after the first hymn book, published in 1844. This traditional art form is alive and well, with “singings” across the country including at John C. Campbell Folk School in the North Carolina mountains, where I teach fiction each summer.