On North Star by Janice Northerns
by Traci Brimhall, Kansas Poet Laureate
Hi, I’m Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas, here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m delighted to share with you a poem by a Kansas poet I love, Janice Northerns.
Janice Northerns grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Texas Tech University. After teaching college and high school English for many years, she took an early retirement to devote more time to writing. She lived in Southwest Kansas with her husband for many years before moving to Wichita.
Northerns’ poems have been published in literary journals, including: Iron Horse Literary Review, Southwestern American Literature, Laurel Review, and many others. Her first collection of poetry, Some Electric Hum, won the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award for poetry from the University of Kansas and the Nelson Book Award from the Kansas Authors Club.
The poem by Janice Northerns that I would like to share with you begins with an epigraph. An epigraph is a quote that appears in the beginning of a poem to give us additional information to bring into our reading of the poem. Although an epigraph usually sits underneath a title, I am going to read the epigraph first, then the title, followed by the poem.
North Star
“Our present-day Polaris won’t remain the North Star forever, due to a motion of Earth known as the precession of the equinoxes.” — Bruce McClure and Deborah Byrd,
“Gamma Cephei: A future Pole Star”
Evenings, we walked that path to barn and back,
me lagging behind as I navigated
cow patties and grassburs, Daddy never breaking
his stride. As his warm calloused hands swung
by his side, I’d reach up, land my hand in his,
feel its sure strength guide me back to the path.
Skipping in from school on days too cold
for plowing, I’d find his hands at work.
Newspapers spread around him, he shelled
pecans and kitchen warmth cocooned us
as I hummed to the steady crack crack
of the hulls. I watched his gloved hands shake
those pecans from the trees his father planted
on this land, trees I once thought would stand
forever, like the towering cliff behind
our house — oh, not really a cliff at all —
just sandstone outcropping, maybe five feet
tall. To my nine-year-old eyes that rock
seemed high as the sky, solid as a father,
but the fissure down its center foretold
how rain and cleaving roots would do their work,
and one day I found sandstone had let go,
left a fractured scrabble at my feet.
This morning, my father stumbles through
the kitchen in this house he built fifty years
ago as though he’s tightrope walking
on a starless night. Trembling, he holds out
his hand. I clasp it tight, steadying his legs
for this journey across an unmapped stretch of sky.
| "On North Star" is used with permission. |
I love that this poem is a story that starts with scientific fact–Polaris won’t always be our north star. When the poem begins, we seem to completely jump away from this fact, and we begin on the path walked from the barn. Northerns gives us so many great sensory details as she navigates between cow patties and grassburrs. Even though cowpatties are mentioned as an image, I can smell them, too. I can feel the warm and calloused hands that Janice Northerns mentions, and then in the next part of the poem I feel the warmth of the kitchen and the future taste of the shelled pecans.
This poem also gives me one of my favorite magic tricks of poetry–time travel, by which I mean the poem leaps around and expands and contracts time like an accordion. We get a reference to the speaker being nine-years-old, which is so specific, and the we telescope out into geologic time as the speaker sees a fissure in sandstone and knows that rain and roots are going to split that rock. I always love seeing things like the Badlands in Kansas or other geologic features that let me see huge period of history all at one glance. Then the poem moves into really specific time again–”this morning my father stumbles the kitchen in this house he built 50 years ago.”
From this specific time we move out to astronomical time as we look up at the stars in the sky. Then, all of a sudden, the title and the epigraph that we have held onto suddenly come together. I love that Janice Northerns trusts me to put these pieces together–how we keep this fact about how Polaris will not always be the north star, how the father has just stumbled, how what guides us on the journey may not always be there. The revelation is quiet and lovely and sad all at once. There’s a phrase in astronomy called averted vision which is how you’re actually supposed to look at star clusters and nebula in a telescope. If you try to look at it too directly, it sort of blurs. You have to look at it from the side a bit, almost letting your vision sneak up on what it is you want to see, and I feel that that’s what this poem does with its revelation about the north star and about how all things change, even the most sure things.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas coming to you from Manhattan, Kansas, “the Little Apple.”
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Traci Brimhall is the current Poet Laureate of Kansas. She's an avid reader of many genres, but her latest obsession has been reading retellings of Greek myths by authors like Natalie Haynes and Jennifer Saint. Those books help her talk to her 10-year-old son about myths, monsters, and demigods while he reads Percy Jackson. She's a professor of creative writing at Kansas State University and lives in Manhattan, KS.
https://tracibrimhallpoet.com/ . Her books can be ordered at https://tracibrimhallpoet.com/works/ .
FEATURED POET
Janice Northerns grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Texas Tech University. After teaching college and high school English for many years, she took an early retirement to devote more time to writing. She lived in Southwest Kansas with her husband for many years before moving to Wichita.
Northerns’ poems have been published in literary journals, including: Iron Horse Literary Review, Southwestern American Literature, Laurel Review, and many others. Her first collection of poetry, Some Electric Hum, won the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award for poetry from the University of Kansas and the Nelson Book Award from the Kansas Authors Club. Find more at https://www.janicenortherns.com/ .
