https://www.poetcharlesfort.com/home daily 1.0 2024-11-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601920231543-YPL2UQRU9VYZLMWZXBSN/FrontPage2.jpeg Home Charles Fort is the author of six books of poetry and ten chapbooks including: The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrews Press)--We Did Not Fear the Father (Red Hen Press)--Darvil, Prose Poems Book 1 (St. Andrews Press)—We Did Not Fear the Father (Carnegie Mellon University Press, reprint, Contemporary Classic)--Frankenstein was a Negro, Prose Poems Book 2 (Backwaters Press)-- Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz, Book 3 (Backwaters Press) and appears in 45 anthologies and The Best American Poetry, 2001 (Rita Dove)—2003 (Yusef Komunyakaa)—2016 (Edward Hirsch). Fort is Distinguished Emeritus Endowed Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Founder of the Wendy Fort Foundation Theater of Fine Arts. Poetry Honors and Awards: Yaddo Fellow 2019--MacDowell Fellow 1996--The Writer’s Voice Poetry Award “On Being Invisible” (For Ralph Ellison) Judge, Grace Paley, 1996--Individual Artist Award in Poetry Connecticut Commission on the Arts manuscript-in-progress Hollow Ground 1992--Poetry Society of America Mary Carolyn Davis Memorial Award “Born On A River” (For Poem Best Set To Music) 1990—Libretto “Born On A River” Commissioned Poem Thirty Piece Orchestra and Choir Wilmington, North Carolina's 250th Anniversary Thalian Hall 1989--Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize “The Writer At His Desk” Judge, Fred Chappell 1985. Fort received the Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Siena Heights University and Faculty Scholar Awards from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Southern Connecticut State University, and he is represented on the NC Literary Map: Fort...who founded the Creative writing program at UNC-Wilmington. Fort has completed 350 villanelles. His first novel is forthcoming: The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1604354836214-X12GYLLI5SEMD7M7Q5JV/image.jpg Home https://www.poetcharlesfort.com/writing-1 daily 0.75 2024-11-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924246031-M5UDKYVRQRA02JRVCN91/FrontPage2.jpeg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924218297-QSZPTY91QFLGQ2S150H4/Anthology1.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924657086-OFI70V91Q2J51VZM5TUR/s-l640.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924220844-S1FDID59TR53NN3UV1HG/IMG_1864.JPG Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924219903-0V6D5BU2PNVJJY218V3G/Darvil.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924219718-6B9DIB9OCYE0IJ2VRD2D/Blues.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924220098-CAMQP8N5R4OAJNKQ6WZD/Frank.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924222878-8FCU6K83MBWO0TPF5W7P/Immortelles.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924224435-0DQ6IOCNHFDVLFGU09NP/Mrs+B.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601924429466-O8ICV9IDVWUT4YGTQGRW/Afro.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601925417953-E0TTPJGFHL5ZKCSACN39/BookCoverLillac.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601925698598-GMVWQ6PO7GZN2VFIKZD7/CamScanner+10-05-2020+15.19.46.png Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1604356171199-6GF3940NFPXV64FRBA18/TheVagrantHours.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601950222539-Z2WG17HOCJ1WMIR4OE8A/PoetryPerformance1.jpg Writing We did not fear the father as the barber who stood like a general in a white jacket with a green visor cap. For six long days he held cut-throat straight razor like a sword until his porcelain-chrome chariot became a down-home chair. The crop-eared son learned to see how a workingman’s day job after the night shift filled the son’s small pockets with licorice, filled the offering plate, and paid for the keeper who clipped our grape vines under his own pageant. We did not fear the father as landlord in our three-story tenement who took charge of four apartments and the attic dwellers. We searched each corner of the dirt cellar for a fuse box while he broke out plasterboard upstairs with a sledgehammer. We peeled out paper from wire mesh and read the headline news a century old before he lifted us like birds into our bunk beds. We did not fear the father until he entered the tomb of noise for his night job, shaping molten steel into ball bearings as we stared into the barbed grate where he stood before the furnace sending smoke into the trees. Fear became the eight-hour echo and glow inside his skull, the high-pitched metal scraping our ears as our provider left the factory floor with oil and sawdust inside his mouth and punched out as the fermented daylight burned his eyes. We did not fear our father until he stooped in the dark. Making Arguments About Literature, A College Textbook Bedford/St. Martin’s Press 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5th Edition The Best American Poetry 2001 Editor, Rita Dove The Georgia Review We Did Not Fear the Father Fort writes: “We Did Not Fear the Father was completed in three years. The first year of drafts took the shape of a prose poem. The second year examined the form. There were shorter lines and stanzas in quatrains. I attempted to use the line We did not fear the father as the approximate line length of the entire work. The third year defined its metaphor, rhythm, and meter. I also used a longer line length: We did not fear the father as the barber who stood, and I found the emphasis I had originally sought in the shorter form remained. I also sustained the poem’s unity and its narrative elements by using the phrase as a refrain. There are two key transitions in the poem. We did not fear the father until he entered the tomb of noise.) The ashes in the furnace are lifted by love and fear. The son fears his father’s weariness. (We did not fear the father until he stooped in the dark and mortality even as his father lifts his sons and daughters like birds into the top bunk beds. The time clock was a pendulum inside his father’s heart that kept him half-alive. The father had a wife, seven children, holiday barbecues, summer garden, and a small black and white fox terrier named Frisky. The father was a workingman who toiled on the nightshift making ball bearings in New Britain, Connecticut (once called the Hardware City of the World) from 11:00 p.m. to seven a.m. for forty years. The father was a barber from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., depending on the head count, for forty years. The father was a landlord in his three-story tenement. He rented the second, third, and attic apartments. He was on call twenty-four hours a day. I wanted to capture the three jobs he held well as his fourth and fifth: he was our father and the scaremonger.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932050593-OOZ703L54AR20RBNZOA8/ThePoet%2527sDaughters.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932031751-XRUUG6HH9DYQI4E4HTLU/TwoDaughters.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932751092-EI6FWL04LNBABZXPO5YF/PoetandDaughters.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932802892-W4GWET9A28N20P4I3WW8/Portrait.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601948915874-D4TQRGK7DTZJZR6HR5JH/FrontPage1.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601933968607-3STZY4HP78HLXA3HEPFL/BookCoverBlue.jpg Writing One had lived in a room and loved nothing. Full of spiders and what memory remained, one had loved and she had forgotten things. Clock stopped and aeroplane lost in the dark, and who was that voice on the telephone? One had lived in a room and loved nothing. It was a rare sleep in helter-skelter; one awakened a half-blessed and charmed fool. One had loved and she had forgotten things. One had lived in a room and loved nothing left alone in her wedding gown and throne. Who gave her a mantis kiss as jazz played? The faceless lover and last known address, a writing pad and table overturned, one had loved and she had forgotten things. What was day or night with no hours left and who were the two in the photograph? One had loved and she had forgotten things. One had lived in a room and loved nothing. The Best American Poetry, 2016 Edward Hirsh, Editor https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601934854510-NLDIYOSY4RV6O9U1MQ8M/Dancer-WifeandPoet.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601949381694-NCB70ZWVL5DILG4Z7SYV/PoetandDancer.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601949353149-WBACW0EDWTVF05JBZZLR/CharlesWendy.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601949368789-3FB68B2VDGIZQIQ5LSJ6/FatherMotherDaughterClaire.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1605805602723-QUER5IL293PIWGVDNSR3/TurtlePress.png Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601951296824-LCP5Y4ITNADL61F7N29K/BowlingGreen.jpg Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601927726748-3PR7QESPMTW43FBVPE9V/image-asset.jpeg Writing 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Full of spiders and what memory remained, one had loved and she had forgotten things. Clock stopped and aeroplane lost in the dark, and who was that voice on the telephone? One had lived in a room and loved nothing. It was a rare sleep in helter-skelter; one awakened a half-blessed and charmed fool. One had loved and she had forgotten things. One had lived in a room and loved nothing left alone in her wedding gown and throne. Who gave her a mantis kiss as jazz played? The faceless lover and last known address, a writing pad and table overturned, one had loved and she had forgotten things. What was day or night with no hours left and who were the two in the photograph? One had loved and she had forgotten things. One had lived in a room and loved nothing. The Best American Poetry, 2016 Edward Hirsh, Editor https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1605805602723-QUER5IL293PIWGVDNSR3/TurtlePress.png New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601934854510-NLDIYOSY4RV6O9U1MQ8M/Dancer-WifeandPoet.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601949381694-NCB70ZWVL5DILG4Z7SYV/PoetandDancer.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601949353149-WBACW0EDWTVF05JBZZLR/CharlesWendy.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601949368789-3FB68B2VDGIZQIQ5LSJ6/FatherMotherDaughterClaire.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601948915874-D4TQRGK7DTZJZR6HR5JH/FrontPage1.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601950222539-Z2WG17HOCJ1WMIR4OE8A/PoetryPerformance1.jpg New Page We did not fear the father as the barber who stood like a general in a white jacket with a green visor cap. For six long days he held cut-throat straight razor like a sword until his porcelain-chrome chariot became a down-home chair. The crop-eared son learned to see how a workingman’s day job after the night shift filled the son’s small pockets with licorice, filled the offering plate, and paid for the keeper who clipped our grape vines under his own pageant. We did not fear the father as landlord in our three-story tenement who took charge of four apartments and the attic dwellers. We searched each corner of the dirt cellar for a fuse box while he broke out plasterboard upstairs with a sledgehammer. We peeled out paper from wire mesh and read the headline news a century old before he lifted us like birds into our bunk beds. We did not fear the father until he entered the tomb of noise for his night job, shaping molten steel into ball bearings as we stared into the barbed grate where he stood before the furnace sending smoke into the trees. Fear became the eight-hour echo and glow inside his skull, the high-pitched metal scraping our ears as our provider left the factory floor with oil and sawdust inside his mouth and punched out as the fermented daylight burned his eyes. We did not fear our father until he stooped in the dark. The Georgia Review 2000 The Best American Poetry Review 2001 Making Arguments About Literature, A College Textbook Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 5 Editions Rita Dove, Editor The Best American Poetry 2001 The Georgia Review https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932050593-OOZ703L54AR20RBNZOA8/ThePoet%2527sDaughters.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932031751-XRUUG6HH9DYQI4E4HTLU/TwoDaughters.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932751092-EI6FWL04LNBABZXPO5YF/PoetandDaughters.jpg New Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601932802892-W4GWET9A28N20P4I3WW8/Portrait.jpg New Page https://www.poetcharlesfort.com/divider daily 0.75 2020-10-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f7347936bd439294db6188a/1601951895232-RMN7D154KXNBGU6AMW56/image-asset.jpeg Divider