My People Was Music

by Kirk Judd

Kirk Judd has lived, worked, trout fished and wandered around in West Virginia all of his life. Upon release, this collection of his poetry already has been acclaimed by Poet Laureates of West Virginia and Illinois.

The collection includes a music CD with Judd's spoken word performance accompanied by acclaimed mountain musicians playing acoustic instruments on traditional mountain songs, as well as original tunes. Breathtaking photography of scenes in the mountains of West Virginia intersperse Judd's powerful words.

A must-have for any poetry-lover's, traditional-music-lover's, or nature-lover's collection.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Rhonda Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Assonance. Ballad. Climax. All the way to Zinger. The poetry in Kirk Judd’s My People Was Music has everything from A to Z, and yet leaves you wanting more, more, more of his gritty, cheeky, soul-baring and heart-blazing words. These pages are filled with the ghosts of people and mountains. Judd strips pretense and honestly exposes the land and people of West Virginia whom so many have inaccurately stereotyped, misjudged, misused and discarded. Here is loss. Here is love. Here is home.

This 120-page collection is more than black words on white pages; My People Was Music includes a CD of Judd’s spoken word performances (one of which is a duet with award-winning-poet Sherrell Wigal) accompanied by acclaimed acoustic musicians, brothers Dave, Mike and Tim Bing, Danny Arthur, Bob Shank, and Pops Walker, who play both traditional mountain ballads and originals created to underscore Judd’s poems. Powerful stuff. You’ll also find breathtaking photography here that does more than just pretty up the pages; it invites study and reflection, mirroring the results of Judd’s words.

Poetry, photography, music, even dancing—this collection is both knife and balm to any artist’s heart.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no gussying-up here. This is the plain hard rock undergirding Appalachia. This is the sound of water rushing, the clawhammer banjo sound, the crack of a wedge as it splits that cross-grained stump of oak. Kirk Judd has been making poems for a long time, but like a pine knotted onto the windswept cliff, he keeps his roots solidly in the earth of his native land.

"What you do is
if you are comin' West on 60
and you run outta gas on top of Gauley Mountain
you just don't hit your brakes
and if you catch all the lights right
well where you stop rollin'
why that's Charleston."
from "Visitin' Charleston (for a poetry reading)"

Appalachian lives braid together like streams of water – running apart, coming together – so with Kirk Judd, who I knew for many years in West Virginia, first as part of the West Virginia Writers annual conference, then as a writer we published in a new literary and art journal, Kestrel, and a guest at the first Kestrel conference at (then) Fairmont State College. We invited international luminaries such as Jean Valentine, Joy Harjo, Donald Hall, to a small town in the heart of the northern coalfields, and brought them together with Appalachian born and bred Maggie Anderson, Marc Harshman, the late Irene McKinney.

Just so with Kirk’s new book, a compilation of works familiar and unfamiliar, written over decades and gathered first in a pair of books, "Field of Vision" and "Tao-Billy." He adds an extra helping by binding in a CD so that we can hear what has made him a popular performer over the years – plain words spoken plainly with an Appalachian twang, and music that rises out of the same hills and hollers.

"Here
is my heart
in these beeches
spared the saw.

Here
is my soft flesh
sunken into this hemlock
so long fallen
the rock has formed around it."
from "Cold Run"

Don't come here looking for just traditional rhymes. though you'll find ballads. Or cutting-edge experimentation, though you'll find some of that, too. Crack this book to find poems rising out of a lived life - love and raw loss, dancing and mourning.

[Laura Bentley · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are stirring, authentic, beautiful, and honest poems by one of West Virginia's finest spoken-word poets, Kirk Judd. Mix in artistic photographs and a CD where Judd brings his words to life along with some amazing acoustic musicians who enhance each poem and even dance to one, and you have a powerful chemistry. If West Virginia could have two Poet Laureates at a time, Judd would be a contender. Warning: Don't listen to this CD alone in the car the first time like I did. You might lose yourself in the poems and almost wreck!