Summer Writing Resident Hiram Larew: Woodlawn So
Hiram Larew was the second writer of the summer 2019 cohort to spend a week onsite participating in our local residency program at Northern Virginia's Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House and Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Our summer writers-in-residence focus their weeks on-site exploring ways to rediscover and repurpose place and place histories, and use writing as a means to build community, to bring awareness to critical social and environmental issues, and as a creative force of empowerment.
Hiram Larew initiated Poetry X Hunger to bring poetry more fully to bear on issues of hunger in the U.S. and around the world -- his involvement in this program spurred his interest in our residency. During his week at Woodlawn and Arcadia, Hiram invited three poets -- Lady Di Beverly, Patrick Washington, and Diane Parks -- from nearby Prince George's County to experience the site and collaborate creatively (pictured). Below are drafts of some of the work that Hiram began during his residency. You can read more about Hiram and his fellow residents here.
Woodlawn So
By: Hiram Larew
Underwood Smear
Slipped through ages’ speak
My voice of you feels ragged deep
as dogs’ teeth might
as ponds freeze do
My fingers twitch with certain you
My heart cuts in
My vision bones
and all provides are haunting
Your gifted breath
My relying yours
…
I kiss what was as questions
I ask myself what happened here
in tree befuddled windows
What message is your me
Elbows jabbed the chant of life
thinking back
And brandished skin or knife
Softly anger overhead
in shadows cast to build
Life the Hills
Take care of my foliage such parents --
Rest in these pages of windows
Comfort the yellowed promise of planks
Fold as scrub and spadings
Ladle these days made for saving and
Acorn the wisdom below me
Every ply twine or fruit is a parent of
Every thorn loop cling is even beyond them
I fear the dares in mortar blooms
My narrows steam with fancy
and work looks down inside me
or foods of sore surround
All my parents and the forest
Are mostly caused by lively blurring --
In leafing are the bolds
Split Light Pope-Leighey
I’ve cedared life off balance which
Blooms the light comes shadowings
Where weeds of poke are lazy curved
The careless melt of bluing wings
The lingered angles
and levers lit
Seem flatly fair and willing full
A living like a wedging
that grows in shelves and dusts the smells
and wakens shines of reds and tops
…
Such feet in wonder flying eyes
My try-to home my never cans
These living lines that porch and crink
My wanting strays my notions’ weeds
How to life with only ofs
With eye-wise greens of bricking
How can I closer doors
or leaf through ways of yellowed sheen
In ways that gift the wood but trouble so
how wonder can I open
How do I history feel this place
Hiram Larew is a retired Director of International Programs within U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Institute of Food and Agriculture where he helped guide several global hunger programs. He worked as an agricultural and higher education policy specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development and held short-term detail assignments at the U.S. Senate and at the U.S. Department of State where he worked closely with United Nations staff. His degrees are in horticulture (BS), botany (MS) and entomology (Ph.D.) He holds courtesy positions at Montana State University, University of Georgia, Baylor University and Oregon State University. He is also a poet whose work has appeared in many journals, anthologies and, in three collections. He reads his work widely, and has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, The Catskills Poetry Workshop, Ropewalk Writers’ Conference and others. He’s been an invited resident poet at The Weymouth Center in North Carolina, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in 2018 at the Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland. A recipient of a Creativity Grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and an Individual Artist grant from the Prince George’s Arts and Humanities Council, he has also been nominated for four national Pushcart Prizes in poetry. He is a member of The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Poetry Board.
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