Photo of Michael McFee by Franklin Golden
Welcome to the March edition of The Hinge Poem, a regular feature inviting readers throughout the Triangle (and beyond) to read and discuss a single poem by a leading local author–and to talk directly with the poet him- or herself.
This month we’re featuring Michael McFee’s “Bunk.” To get started on the conversation, scroll down, read the poem, and then post your questions, answers and observations in the comment section (if you’re on the home page, you’ll first need to click on “Leave a comment” below or the headline above.) Read what others have written, engage, discuss–just be respectful. It’s fine to disagree, but we’ll delete ad hominem attacks and insulting language.
Most importantly, remember to come back on Monday, March 19, from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., when Michael McFee will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
BUNK
“That’s just a bunch of bunk!”
I hollered at my windbag teenage cousin
teasing out tales about my sister
there on the side porch’s spongy slanted floor,
describing her raw adventures
with twins in a rowboat out on Beaver Lake.
I was too young, too American
to say humbug, claptrap, balderdash, twaddle;
I might have known to call it
baloney but hadn’t yet learned guff, hogwash,
or what his ripe lies were:
bullshit, horseshit, dogshit, just plain old shit.
And I had no clue that bunk
came from the same Carolina mountain county
where I continued shouting it
at my kinsman multiplying empty words
about how the Vance boys
lost their paddles and had to drift all night
taking turns comforting sis:
he wouldn’t sit down and shut up any more
than voluble Congressman
Felix Walker, who defended an ill-timed oration
on the House floor in 1820
by saying he was “only speaking for Buncombe,”
to the constituents back home
and not to his colleagues who’d been debating
Missouri’s slave or free status.
And so his self-serving pointless speechifying
entered the language as bunkum,
immortalizing my native place as a synonym
for piffle, poppycock, and rot,
nonsense, horsefeathers, flapdoodle, hooey, hokum.
All I knew to do, in 1963,
in my nine-year-old righteous brotherly rage,
choking on the purple prose
of Asheville dusk and the story’s moonshine
and the gall of my slick cousin
filibustering to hear his own foolish voice,
was stick with the loud sentence
adults pronounced to end their arguments:
“That’s just a bunch of bunk!”
About the Author: Michael McFee was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and has taught for several decades in the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. His nine previous collections of poetry include Shinemaster (2006), Earthly (2001), and Colander (1996), all published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and The Smallest Talk (2007), a chapbook of one-line poems published by Bull City Press in Durham. He is also the author of a prose book, The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview (2006), and the editor of several anthologies of North Carolina literature.
In the coming weeks, Michael will be giving readings throughout the area to promote his new book, That Was Oasis, including the following:
–Tuesday, March 13: Regulator Bookshop, Durham,7 p.m.
–Saturday, March 31: Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, 2 p.m.
–Saturday, April 7: McIntyres Bookshop, Pittsboro, 11 a.m.
–Sunday, April 15: Quail Ridge Bookshop, Raleigh, 3 p.m.
The conversation starts below. And once again, remember to come back on Monday, March 19, from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., when Michael McFee will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
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